Joining the Influencers: LinkedIn Opens Blogging Platform to More Users
For a few years now, LinkedIn has been the primary social network where business professionals can connect with one another and share interesting industry news and updates. Without a doubt, it’s the ideal place to connect with and expand a business’s network, both of which can contribute to a business’s growth.
But like all social networks, LinkedIn would have to continue to enhance their platform in order to keep up with their competition, Facebook and Twitter. Both of these social networks have held a big monopoly on celebrities and big-name influencers for years, and they would take advantage of these networks to engage with fans.
In October of 2012, LinkedIn took their professional connections network to another level by including a blogging platform that would personally invite 150+ influential thinkers (anyone from Barack Obama to Mashable’s Pete Cashmore) to share their thoughts as leaders with the entire LinkedIn community. Users could then add these influential posts to be commented-on and shared. This was known as the LinkedIn Influencer program and, according to Ryan Roslansky, the average Influencer post brings in an average of 31k views 250 Likes and 80 comments.
The goal of this platform was to boost engagement on LinkedIn, but in a different way. And you know what? It worked! So much, in fact, that now LinkedIn is slowly opening up its publishing features to all of its members. While giving users access to valuable business knowledge from influencers has certainly proved to be quite powerful, that was only the tip of the iceberg. By giving all LinkedIn members the opportunity a new way to build their professional brand, they too can share their experience within their network.
With this new platform now available to all LinkedIn users, the ability to publish a blog post is expected to grow from 27,000 users to all 270+ million users within the next couple of months.
As of February 19th of this year, 25k more members will be able to publish content on Linkedin. Come again? Only 25,000 out of the 270 million, you say? If you’re not already one of the “chosen” ones (if you haven’t received an email that looks something like this), don’t worry too much. While Linkedin is doing its best to offer its members choice, they still need to guarantee quality content from those members in order to avoid the risk of content shock, which is exactly why they need to limit the number of users who have access to the new platform (at least for now).
There is no question that LinkedIn is taking their publishing platform seriously, ensuring that all content published is useful and relevant to their users, so it stands to reason that they’ll need a little extra time to acquire all of the makings of a great publishing platform.Over the next few months, LinkedIn plans to further expand this opportunity to all members in multiple languages.
How can it work for your business?
So now, the question is: can we expect people to actually use it; will anyone engage with this content, and will this be a valuable content marketing strategy for your own business?
Whenever a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, that original content will then become a part of their professional profile, which is then automatically shared with their trusted network. But it goes further than that: publishing content (photos, images, videos, and presentations on SlideShare) on LinkedIn in this fashion gives your business the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever put together, which will allow you to follow other members who are not necessarily in your network, and then build your own group of followers. How cool is that?
For many businesses, this new platform will be able to provide many of this social media network’s users the chance to grow his/her frequency, which can also give individuals who have valuable information to share the opportunity to become influencers themselves. So, watch out for that invitation in the next coming weeks and jump on the bandwagon as soon as you can!
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