5 ways news brands can take advantage of Linkedin

LinkedIn may have started out as a simple way to build professional connections and share contact details, but more users are looking to share articles that interest them, the Digital Media Europe conference heard today.

Isabelle Roughol, France editor for LinkedIn, told delegates that, compared to five years ago, there are five times as many people coming to the site for content than for jobs searches.

"It is not the LinkedIn of five years ago," she said.

"The content philosophy of what people are looking for is industry analysis, the state of the world," she said, "everything you need to know to be an informed business person," and "a lot of aspirational and inspirational content".

LinkedIn is becoming a "huge traffic source for publishers" she said, as Linkedin seeks to fulfil their mission of "helping people be more productive and successful".

Quartz and Mashable have had particular success with content shared to LinkedIn, she said, in that readers "tend to be more engaged and come back more often".

But how can publishers reach the 277 million Linkedin users?

Pulse

"All content lives under Pulse", said Roughol, referring to the content aggregation platform bought by LinkedIn last April.

"It's about aggregating, discovering and distributing content relevant to you, depending on your interests," she said.

Pulse pushes relevant articles to LinkedIn users in their newsfeed when they first log in.

Writing on LinkedIn

Writing on LinkedIn is a new feature which the network is in the process of introducing to users.

"It's essentially a publishing platform on LinkedIn to write about all the subjects users know about professionally," Roughol said.

"Once published, the content will be distributed to all your LinkedIn connections and it can grow virally around the site."

Although it is currently only available to a select number of users, "thousands" are being added each week, she said, and it will continue to reach users throughout the year.

Use the InShare plugin

The InShare plugin can be added to pages on an outlet's site to let users share articles and content on LinkedIn, Roughol said, in the same way as a Twitter or Facebook button.

"It allows your readers or members to share that content to their network on LinkedIn," she said. "That content will appear in their stream and can be shared and engaged with and hopefully feed into a viral loop on the site."

Add a company page

A company page is the home for an organisation in the same way that a Facebook or Twitter profile may be, said Roughol.

Users can follow an organisation and it can be the main platform for a company to distribute their own content and articles around the network.

Share RSS feeds

A quicker and easier way to share content on LinkedIn is by sharing a website's RSS Feed with the network, where articles will be automatically added to Pulse for distribution.

Submitting a link to the RSS feed to publisher@linkedin.com will ensure a publisher's content ends up on Pulse.

A copy of Roughol's presentation can be found below:

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