From providing a platform for business professionals to share content, LinkedIn is now shifting its attention to the business of generating content, that is, flooding your feed with news.
LinkedIn’s move is just one of the many manifestations that the social networking space is moving beyond just connecting people and making the world smaller to other services such as telecommunication and mobile payment option, a diversity of services to keep the dollar streaming in.
In LinkedIn’s case, content is the focus and nowhere is it more evident than in the company’s efforts to increase the amount of original content on the feeds of its users. This news comes hard on the heels of a recent report that indicates Facebook has been holding discussions with various publishers to host their content directly through Facebook’s news feed. That means it is only a matter of time before we see some news content becoming native elements of our feeds, which will spare you the time to visit an external web page to view a post’s content.
LinkedIn’s vice president of marketing solutions Penry Price stressed that the company is competing with traditional media outlets, lamenting that the social media for business professionals is erroneously categorized with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, though Price did not specify how else LinkedIn differs from those platforms.
For instance, LinkedIn earlier revamped its post feature into something akin to a blog by extending its long-form post feature to at least 230 million English-speaking members so that they are able to start writing posts to the social networking site. Members have since produced 50,000 posts every week.
LinkedIn believes it is content that influences the member’s interest to stay in the site, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of sponsored content on LinkedIn, thus an increase in ads revenue. So that’s the goal of it eventually. Advertising around is where LinkedIn gets its lifeblood.
The content-creation among social networking platforms such as LinkedIn is becoming increasingly a trend, and looks poised to be the highlight in the months or years to come. And that looks sensible to LinkedIn at the very least, given the appealing promise of huge profit for advertisers, at the expense of the more traditional media outlets.
But if you’re into traditional media and is not cut out to keep up with the fierce competition in the technology landscape, you will definitely be left out in the end. LinkedIn is keen on engaging with a broader audience for money. It is now trying to give users more reasons to pick the site over the other media platforms.
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