LinkedIn has a content problem, although not quite the content problem you might think.
The professional networking site, acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) last December for nearly $26 billion, sees a lot of distributed and original content come through, fueling a 40%-plus year-over-year increase in user engagement with its news feed. But until now, LinkedIn lacked a solution for organizing all that content in a way its 450 million users could quickly and conveniently digest.
On Wednesday, however, the site announced Trending Storylines, a new section for web and mobile that shows news and content it thinks you’ll find relevant and interesting.
For LinkedIn, it’s a smart move, albeit a late one, given Facebook’s (FB) own Trending section has been available to users for well over two years now. But while LinkedIn launched Trending Storylines much later, its version appears smarter and more useful.
In my own personal experience toggling between the two, I found the topics and news stories suggested by LinkedIn better catered to my interests and ultimately more useful. It also helps that Trending Storylines is available for mobile, as well, while Facebook’s Trending section remains a notable omission from the main Facebook mobile app.
“If you just want to quickly catch up and say, ‘What’s going on with the world that I need to know about?’ it’s a hard thing to do on LinkedIn right now,” acknowledged LinkedIn executive editor Dan Roth. (Disclosure: I worked with Roth over five years ago at Fortune Magazine.)
“This product that we’re launching is kind of a next step in LinkedIn’s evolution, which I think solves that issue,” he added. “Our goal is to make sure [our users are] given the chance to sound smarter, so they can walk into any meeting and know exactly what people might be talking about.”
On the desktop, LinkedIn users will notice a new section that appears on the upper right-hand side labeled “What people are talking about right now”:
No comments:
Post a Comment