LinkedIn VP Daniel Roth has been quoted in 3 publications in recent weeks talking about the company’s decision to ‘solidify its ties with publishers with a view to boosting industry-specific engagement’.
A report in Axios said the move 'offers outlets and journalists a platform to meaningfully grow their audiences amid a broader tech crackdown on news content'. Newsletters from publishers such as The Wall Street Journal have gained much greater reach on LinkedIn than from their in-house efforts.
LinkedIn already works with over 400 news publishers globally, and Roth says it will be investing more in journalism and news, against the trend of larger social media platforms doing the opposite. Overall, news publishers have amassed a collective following of over 240 million on LinkedIn with 44 million members engaging with content weekly.
LinkedIn has made a concerted effort to court all types of news sites, but is particularly focused on those that cover business or professional topics and is constantly looking for ways to drive traffic to relevant news content.
Two other moves by LinkedIn are also factor into how this all affects us, small content publishers that LinkedIn has relied on for so long to populate its feed.
From the beginning of March it began making Creator mode available to everyone, thus downgrading the claimed benefits such as greater content reach.
Now, however, LinkedIn is turning to publications that offer more specialised insight, as opposed to trying to build its own in-stream influencers (like you and me) whom he describes as ‘only a subset of the company's much larger user base'.
This casts Dan Roth’s comments to Entrepreneur recently in a different light. He said that LinkedIn wants to be a more active content matchmaker, ‘recognising what individual users are interested in, and then surfacing relevant posts regardless of when they were created.’
The plan is to incentivise users to post more useful content by displaying it as a special "suggested post." This feature is being tested now.
To me it seems that producing quality evergreen content will be important, with success measured over weeks and months, not hours and days.
My opinion: this opens the door to new opportunities while closing it on other strategies we've all used for years. It's time for a rethink.