LinkedIn has always been looking for fresh avenues for its members to meaningfully contribute and share professional insights on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has now expanded its publishing platform, by permitting members – in addition to Influencers – to publish long-form posts about their experie4nce, expertise and professional interests.
The advantages of publishing a long-form post on LinkedIn are many. For instance, your original content becomes part of your professional profile, and it is prominently displayed on the Posts section of your LinkedIn profile. Your content is shared with your connections / followers.
The additional benefit is members, not in your network can now follow you from your long-form post to receive updates when you publish next. To crown it all, your long-form post is searchable both on and off of LinkedIn.
Hitherto, LinkedIn had allowed only a small, editorially selected group of influencers, like Bill Gates and President Obama to publish their thoughts and advice to its network as long-form blog posts. Now, with the present changes, LinkedIn throws open up access to its publishing platform to all the 277 million users on its network.
LinkedIn says the rollout is phased, with initial access available for some 25,000 English language users of LinkedIn. A worldwide reach will be achieved over time.
“One of our big, strategic bets for the company is for LinkedIn to become the definitive, professional publishing platform,” commented Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content Products at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn does this because it wishes to be a place where members can become productive and competent professionals – not just those trying to seek employment, or search for the credentials of another person,
It may be said that LinkedIn needs a footing that would make it more of a daily or at least a weekly destination for end users, instead of a place people go to update their resume when looking for new employment.
The proposed open access to publishing on LinkedIn would obviously allow others to break into these more exclusive realms by writing posts that find a wider audience engaging with and sharing their content.
LinkedIn is also adding a few new Influencers in tandem with the wider publishing rollout. Many may wonder why publish content on LinkedIn when you already have a blog? The simple answer is – you should do both as one cannot substitute the other.