LinkedIn’s publishing platform, previously only accessible to US users, has now been rolled out to more than 130 million English-speaking users outside of the United States.
The company announced the expansion of its publishing tool yesterday, which now brings the total amount of people that could potentially publish content on LinkedIn to 230 million.
With this change, LinkedIn is encouraging its users to treat the social network more like a blog — the company wants users to publish longer posts with photos and headlines versus just a simple status update, or a link to an article published elsewhere.
LinkedIn’s publishing platform has evolved quite a bit since it was first introduced. Initially only a select group of hand picked “influencers” were invited to publish on the network, then it was rolled out to US users, and now it has expanded worldwide to english-speaking users.
A full rollout to non-English speaking users is not in the company’s short term plans, instead LinkedIn is going to wait and see how users outside the US engage with the service so it’s known what to expect when the service eventually rolls out in other languages.
Despite being rolled out to more users over the past year, the service is still struggling to gain a strong user base. Since LinkedIn publishing was rolled out to all users in February 2014, there have been 1 million posts published. That means only one percent of people who were able to publish something on LinkedIn actually did so.
Will this expanded rollout encourage more users to come on board? Time will tell, but it’s a step in the right direction at least.
