Usually our tool of the month is something that you might not have come across before, but this month we want to look at some of the new – or hidden – functionality that you might not have come across in the professional social network, LinkedIn.

If you have the LinkedIn app on your phone and have granted permission for it to access your contacts, you might not have noticed that it will automatically suggest connecting with anyone listed as a contact on your phone. In some instances – meeting a colleague at a conference and only having their phone number but not their company name – this will be helpful, but in others – friends, family, neighbours, former lovers, it may verge on slightly creepy.

Secondly, LinkedIn recently launched its Website Demographics tool, which allows site owners to see the demographics of their web visitors. LinkedIn’s audience segmentation is almost without rival when it comes to B2B marketing, so being able to see the seniority, industry and company size of your site visitors is incredibly useful. The tool will appear as part of LinkedIn campaign manager and is gradually going live over the summer period.

These two tools go hand in hand with LinkedIn’s ‘matched audience’ functionality – essentially identical to Facebook’s lookalike targeting. It’s taken a little while for LinkedIn to offer marketers a sophisticated martech experience, but we’re excited by this evolution and looking forward to whatever the network has planned for the future.