LinkedIn unveils its new blogging platform
LinkedIn has rolled out a new version of LinkedIn Publishing. Its intention is to enable its posters to reach and better engage with their audience.
Over 450 million of us use LinkedIn, and almost three million people have used the interface to post.
LinkedIn bought the newsreader app Pulse for $50 million in 2013, bolstering its digital publishing through acquisition. It had aims to become the "definitive professional publishing platform" and refreshed its app towards the end of 2013.
By the spring of 2014, influencers started to publish on the LinkedIn platform. There are now over 500 influencers who publish regularly on LinkedIn. They find that shorter posts of under 2,000 words perform best with readers, and eye-catching headlines matter.
Articles on salary negotiation, having 250 coffee meetings, or simply telling the story behind the publishing platform at LinkedIn get more engagement than lists and click bait.
Its new interface focuses on the design, with a nice looking UI and more text formatting and font options. It has also removed a lot of extraneous junk from the page to give the reader a better reading view.
Writing a post in the LinkedIn editor now means you have more of the screen to play with. Now banners and screens are displayed full width.
Multimedia can be added by dragging and dropping. Inline videos, slides, and podcasts are supported. Hashtags can be added to posts before publication in order to surface when content is searched for.
LinkedIn has currently enabled search by hashtags on mobile, but has plans to bring this to the desktop experience too.
LinkedIn uses an open sourced editor, Quill. Quill uses a Document Object Management (DOM) abstraction layer instead of interacting directly with the document object.
This makes the publishing process faster and more reliable. LinkedIn hopes that other features, such as collaborative editing and custom rich media types may become available in the future.
LinkedIn Publishing is only available to users in the US at the moment and will be rolled out internationally shortly afterwards. For business-based bloggers, the platform is certainly worth a look.