LinkedIn Becomes a Publisher with Influencers and LinkedIn Today
Aug 13 2013
LinkedIn is more than just a social network… it is starting to also become a publisher. I saw an article this morning on AdAge about the new LinkedIn program. This means that LinkedIn will become an EVEN MORE IMPORTANT SOCIAL NETWORK.
Basically, LinkedIn will now be producing original content that can be found on LinkedIn Today. This content can show up in your newsfeed and also in the emails that you receive from LinkedIn.
First, LinkedIn has developed Channels, so users can sign up for the news categories that they are most interested in. In the screenshot below you can see the different channels that I can choose to follow. There aren’t a lot of channels yet, but presumably LinkedIn will expand on this over time.
Currently the LinkedIn news section doesn’t include 100% content from LinkedIn. For example one of the articles I found under Entrepreneurship was on Entrepreneur.com. That being said, the big news is that more of the news will be published directly on LinkedIn. The screenshot below shows an article by Richard Branson that is hosted directly on LinkedIn. The stories that are included in channels and feeds are pulled from the LinkedIn “Influencer” program, where LinkedIn has selected Influencers who may share news to be featured in these sections. LinkedIn can generate a huge number of views for these articles.
For example, on July 22, Richard Branson published an Influencer post entitled, “What Inspires Me: Game-Changing People Everywhere.” Branson has over 2.2 million LinkedIn followers, and his article was shared directly from the LinkedIn site roughly 8,000 times, generating nearly 1,000 comments and 140,000 views.
LinkedIn has a huge audience, which means that their new publisher program could have tremendous reach.
With a registered audience of more than 230 million, LinkedIn has more than 50 times the number of registered users as the Financial Times. LinkedIn drives around 10 billion page views per month, compared to 133 million for The Wall Street Journal. LinkedIn had 116 million unique visitors last quarter, compared to 13 million average monthly uniques for The Journal.
If LinkedIn can create leading business content with contributors like Richard Branson, it seems logical that more people will begin to spend more time on the site. Today many users don’t really check LinkedIn very often. If LinkedIn begins to share interesting and relevant industry news, people may start spending more time on the site, making it more and more relevant.
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