LinkedIn wants businesses and employees to be more data savvy when it comes to finding and sharing articles, blog posts, slide shows and other stories on its site.
The business-oriented social networking company has been testing a new product called LinkedIn Elevate, which suggests content for employees to share, lets them schedule the best time to post it on LinkedIn or Twitter and provides data — likes, comments, engagement time and more — that shows how much traffic it drove.
"We realize it's not that easy. It's difficult finding quality content on a regular basis, figuring out how to get that content to the right employees and then proving that it's actually valuable to the bottom line of the business," said Will Sun, a product manager at LinkedIn, in a webinar last week.
LinkedIn said it has been successfully piloting the product with Adobe, Quintiles, Unilever and other companies this year. LinkedIn Elevate is currently available to businesses by invitation only.
The advantage LinkedIn has over competitors is that more than 300 million people use the service, said Omar Akhtar, of the research and consulting firm Altimeter Group.
"The real power that LinkedIn has is that most employees are already on it and if they're not they're encouraged to be on it, which means they have a whole bunch of data that is relevant to what people are sharing," he said.
Companies that are more heavily regulated by government might be more wary of social media marketing through sharing more content. "That's a problem that LinkedIn and others have to overcome," Akhtar said.
LinkedIn plans to formally launch the product between July and September. The company plans to charge businesses for the service, but has not disclosed the price yet.
