LinkedIn has become an extremely popular portal for the social side of career life. The site has had no problems luring in new users and finding ways to integrate with other social networking options – but it still hadn’t found a surefire way to get people to log more time on its site.
Think about it: How much time do you actually spend in LinkedIn.com? Unless you’re fine-tuning your profile or searching for potential employees, the answer is probably not a lot. Most of us are content to let our accounts sit there until we can post an addition to our resume. Of course LinkedIn knows this, which is why it’s launching LinkedIn Today.
LinkedIn Today is a news aggregation service that pulls content from profiles and posted topics, offering personalized news to its users. Of course, a curated news platform is nothing noteworthy, but what does set LinkedIn apart from competitors is that it’s personalized to offer information based on your market sector as well. Story rank is determined by how many people in your network have Tweeted or shared them, and users can also browse at what’s trending in other industries – which could become a helpful on-the-job tool for those with analysis backgrounds. Industry-specific stories not specific enough? You can narrow it down to company, or even location. You can imagine that from a job hunter’s perspective, discovering what type of news your dream jobs CEO deems share-worthy could be valuable. And of course, LinkedIn Today is also available on the site’s iPhone app.
LinkedIn introduced a few tools with its news platform, like the ability to save stories for later and follow the sources it’s using. And of course, it wants to begin integrating its LinkedIn Share button into major news sources alongside Twitter and Facebook options. This is a natural and positive step in LinkedIn’s evolution, but we hope the site exercises some caution. It’s built a solid reputation for itself as a professional network that’s popular, effective, and easy-to-navigate – while avoiding some of the annoying information overload other social sites are subject to.
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