LinkedIn has killed off its products and services pages and launched two new analytics tools this week.

What does this mean for member organisations, member communications and engagement?

LinkedIn has announced two new tools: Content Marketing Score (CMS) and Trending Content.

CMS will help member organisations evaluate engagement, benchmark content and it will recommend improvements.

Trending content will rank topics against specific audiences to help tailoring of content.

The new tools will help LinkedIn evaluate and rank your content so it can determine which posts are of most value to users.

It also means LinkedIn can start to rethink how it curates content to appear in newsfeeds and how organisations can make posts more prominent.

It looks like advertising will feature heavily in LinkedIn's revenue plans.

There is already some evidence of this. If you request your CMS score, LinkedIn asks for your 'Quarterly advertising budget'.

The powerful score tools will be reading content and deciding which posts have the most value.

Over the coming months, it's highly likely that page analytics will start suggesting paid-for boosting to improve reach and engagement.

If you haven't got a paid-for advertising strategy then you could see your member engagement falling away.

Social Ogilvy has been tracking brand engagement on Facebook business pages and revealed that organic reach fell to just 16% in 2012 and is now between 2-6%.

It is expected that this will fall to zero soon.

This means that Facebook posts on business pages will not enter newsfeeds of fans unless you pay to boost posts.

Advertising on social media has got a bad press, especially for B2B.

Facebook suffered from a confusing number of advertising products and constantly changing algorithms and available analytical data. Twitter has three advertising products but if you are based in the UK, you can't focus on geographical regions and the campaign analytics are very poor.

It's time to plan.

Think about what you are advertising to members. Is there a clear call to action?

Does the link send them to a site that is not responsive? Do you understand how to measure outcomes?

Members using social media are in a different mindset than when they use Google.

It's important to survey your members to understand their behaviour on social media.

The worst thing that can happen is your members become more digital than your organisation and you become less valuable.

There are some useful blogs on getting started, have a read of Charity Chap's blog on Twitter ads and search for Facebook tips on WordStream.

It's important to start training or researching help from an agency.

Social media platforms now need to make back their investment money.

We are used to reaching members for free but free is now over.

Member organisations will need to start paying to keep on reaching members.

Advertising on social media is evolving and ROI is going to be challenging.

The onus is on social media platforms to make advertising easy to use and understandable for all levels of business, while delivering returns.

Social media is a world full of rapid change with a constant stream of new features, aggressive acquisitions and trends.

The platforms are going to have to tread carefully with advertising. Organisations are not used to paying and audiences aren't used to have ads all over their feeds.

But for now, organic reach is over on Facebook and LinkedIn has just become a completely different experience.

The race is on to find out how to maximise its potential.

Get in touch!