Professional networking site LinkedIn has opened up a new publishing platform for all its members globally. A move that will help the networking site achieve the goal of becoming a definitive publishing platform for professionals, helping members become better at their jobs by giving them a single destination to consume, create and share relevant professional content.
The move, experts feel, is to generate interest among the members and take on other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn has disclosed that page views had slipped for the second consecutive quarter this year.
The company is now shifting its positioning as just a plaftform for headhunters and job-seekers, to a social site with several new features such as news, links, and status updates from members.
In addition to that it has added a new crop of Influencers in India including Pepsico CEO Indira Nooyi and Swati Piramal of Piramal Enterprises to the already existing ones including Infosys executive vice chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan, HCL CEO Anant Gupta, Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Nandan Nilekani amongst others.
LinkedIn Influencer started in fall of 2012 globally features top voices in business such as Richard Branson, Martha Stewart and Bill Gates.
Ryan Roslansky, Head Content, in a statement said that the new blogging platform allows the members to publish long format original content tied to their professional identities. Earlier the service was only exclusive to a select few Influencers.
Starting today, 25,000 members will have the ability to publish content on LinkedIn. We’ll be steadily expanding the capability to all members in multiple languages over the next few weeks, LinkedIn added.
This content then becomes part of their professional profile and can be shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled.
LinkedIn has 277 million members globally, of which 50 million are based in the Asia-Pacific. Combined, members have more than 434 million years of experience.