LinkedIn launches social news service
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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While LinkedIn has been going from strength to strength in terms of its membership – it currently stands at 90 million worldwide – it has been lagging behind Facebook and Twitter in terms of user activity on the site. LinkedIn members tend to use the site to find information on people, research and prepare for job interviews and respond to invitations to join the network. Of course, this may be due to the demographic make-up of its membership. I would hazard a guess that the average Facebook and Twitter user is considerably younger than the average LinkedIn member.

However LinkedIn, which announced an IPO earlier this year  - due to be first of many of the major social networking companies - wants to become more popular and engage more with its users. LiveWire reported on a beta product called Signal, which the business networking site launched in October last year, with the aim of filtering relevant information from LinkedIn and Twitter updates.

Now LinkedIn has gone a step further towards competing with Facebook’s  News Feed option. A LinkedIn company blog posted last Thursday announced the beta launch of LinkedIn Today, a social news product that aggregates news using content from members’ connections.

According to the LinkedIn blog, the new feature allows users to view articles that are being shared by their connections, that are deemed to be of interest to their industry peers, or that are seen to be of interest “to the wider professional audience”.

The idea behind LinkedIn Today is for members to keep up-to-date with their own and their clients’ industries and to get more into the habit of sharing information. LinkedIn Today, for example, enables users to see who is interested in what news and who has tweeted information – via its partnership with Twitter.

I liked the fact that you can create news pages for each industry you follow. Based on my profile for example, LinkedIn has suggested that I follow news on the online industry and on marketing & advertising. There are currently 20 other industries that you can follow. I managed to pick up news on announcements made by the Huffington Post, a new Facebook service involving discount deals and a new report on data breaches. All relevant information that is of interest to me.

According to Susan Etlinger, a consultant at research firm Altimeter Group, the service marks a new departure for LinkedIn. Rather than just collecting data, the networking site is trying to provide its users with added value and insight.

In addition to reading news on your LinkedIn front page, you can opt to have weekly emails with updates sent to you. The new feature will also be available as an iPhone app.

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