LinkedIn Expands Blogging Tool, Wants More People Writing Long-Form

LinkedIn wants more people sharing on LinkedIn.

The professional network expanded its publishing tool late Wednesday, granting long-form publishing power to more than 130 million English-speaking LinkedIn members outside the United States, according to LinkedIn’s Head of Content Ryan Roslansky.

Publishing was initially reserved for U.S. users only, and the update means that the pool of people who can write blog-style content on LinkedIn has more than doubled to 230 million.

The move represents a significant step in what has been a relatively slow process of encouraging users to treat LinkedIn more like a blog.

Publishing power — that is, the ability to create longer posts on LinkedIn with photos and headlines versus a simple status update — was initially reserved for a hand-selected group of influencers. Last February, LinkedIn announced plans to bring this tool to all users, but only rolled out the product to those in the U.S. Almost a year later, it has expanded to all English users worldwide, but that still leaves more than 100 million non-English users without publishing power.

Roslansky says there’s no timetable for a full rollout. Instead, the company plans to study how non-U.S. members use the service so that when it is rolled out in other languages, they can be better prepared for what to expect.

The only major change for U.S. users is that their feeds may soon include more content from the international community. LinkedIn uses an algorithm (similar to Facebook’s) to determine what you may want to see, and popular posts from outside the U.S. may soon show up in your feed regardless of where your connections are located.

It seems, though, that even this change may be hard to notice. Roslansky says that there have been 1 million posts published since the tool was rolled out in February. That means that at most, one percent of eligible users actually published anything, meaning it’s a relatively small community using LinkedIn to write substantive articles.

So what’s the driver for LinkedIn? Publishing allows users to enhance their profiles and build their personal brands, CEO Jeff Weiner told Re/code in December. Plus, more content means more people coming to LinkedIn to read that content — which means more revenue, too.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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