Introducing Audio Events, new features for Newsletters & more + Inspiring conversations about why #representationmatters and extraordinary kindness

Every other week, I share with the product team at LinkedIn new products and experiments that seem to be working — or not!— so that we can all learn from each other. I’m going to start publishing these here, too (with anything confidential x’ed out or removed). I hope this gives you some ideas for what we’re building, why we’re building it, and how we operate; I’d love your feedback on everything! – Tomer 

---

Hey team,

I hope you are having a good start to 2022. With the recent Omicron surge, I realize that for many of us the beginning of the year has been quite challenging -- needing to support family, friends, or teammates. Whatever your situation is, I hope you are able to stay safe and healthy, both physically and mentally, and reach out for support when you need it. 

As we start 2022, we are seeing strong continuous momentum in member and community engagement across the LinkedIn ecosystem. To better learn how we can help make our members be more productive and successful, I asked them for feedback.

The response has been tremendous with over 1000 reactions and great suggestions through several posts in the feed and messages. The feedback is still coming in and I’ve read each one so far. Once they’re all in, we’ll share them internally across all teams so we can learn together from our members and customers. In the meantime, please take the time to read through the thread to get a sense of how we can do better.  

And now, on to our product updates…

1 Bringing professional communities together through interactive Audio Events 

One of the best ways to start or join a professional community is through an event. It’s where professionals come together to learn, inspire, and most importantly, connect. Needless to say, these moments of connection are critical right now with many of us working in hybrid or virtual environments. LinkedIn is becoming the platform to create and run professional events online with a 231% year-over-year (y/y) increase in annual attendees of virtual events and a 150% y/y increase in all kinds of professional events created (e.g. AI innovations, opening keynotes for big conferences, financial planning AMA, live home installations, mentorship conversations, cybersecurity discussions, award ceremonies).

This month, we’re taking a big step forward by launching an entirely new interactive Events experience. We’ll be testing this experience with Audio Events (Video Events coming soon). Any member can now tune in to listen to great conversations, see who else is in the event, connect with one another, and even join the hosts in the live conversation simply by raising their hands. Here are just a few of the upcoming events:

• Jan 20: Q&A with Quantitative & Qualitative Research Experts
• Jan 25: Scale Up: Building the Bridge to Corporate Venture Capital
• Jan 28: Privacy, Policy, and Protection for Business Owners

What’s next: We’re kicking off in beta with a few thousand creators and we’ll expand the ability to host Audio Events to more creators in the coming months. In addition, we’ll start rolling out our Video Events format later this spring. You can learn more about our launch in this article from Jake Poses. 

2 Creating and showcasing Newsletters on your LinkedIn profile and page 

Newsletters are a great way for creators to regularly share content about a topic they are passionate about to ensure their audience stays up to date. For subscribers, it’s a great way to never miss exceptional content from the creators you care most about. A few months ago, we launched this capability for every creator on LinkedIn and we have seen tremendous pickup by both creators and subscribers. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, see Mike Yates's newsletter on education titled, “Schoolish”, The Perfeqta of the Future of Work by Latesha Byrd, or Erica Dhawan’s titled Supercharge Collaboration,  or better yet, start your own newsletter.

We are adding two new capabilities to newsletters:

• Featuring your newsletters on your profile: We are rolling out the ability for creators to showcase Newsletters using their Featured section on their profile which allows viewers to easily discover and subscribe to it. 

• Coming soon! Newsletters on Pages: Soon, pages with over 500 Followers will be able to create Newsletters and regularly connect with their communities on LinkedIn. Newsletters can be a great way for brands to announce cool product launches, share thought leadership, or highlight company news through a series of LinkedIn articles. Members, of course, will be able to easily subscribe to the Page newsletters they care most about and get notified when a new article is published. See below an example from Zoom that as part of our pilot program, garnered 40,000+ subscribers for their Zoom Newsletter within 24 hours of its creation. 

What’s next: We’re continuing to invest in our newsletters, from editing to sharing to analytics. More to come. 

3 Sharing professional moments has never been easier

Your professional journey includes many important moments that present the perfect opportunity to share with your community. For instance, when you start a new role. On LinkedIn, we often see members share this key milestone with their network for awareness, support, and celebration. Take, for example, Andre Dickens, who chose to celebrate his new role as the 61st mayor of Atlanta on LinkedIn.

To make it simpler for members to do so, we added shareable prompts so when members add new positions they can share and express their key moments and personal stories.

What’s next: We know your professional journey includes many more important moments that you would like to share with your community and we are investing in new ways to help you to share these milestones. 

4 Empowering members to help each other hire and find a job

With job posting and hiring on LinkedIn continuously growing at record levels, nearly all hirers try to leverage their professional network to find great talent. However, many of their connections are not aware that they are hiring (or what roles they are hiring for). On the other hand, more and more jobseekers are turning to their networks to discover job opportunities that are best suited for them. As a result, we see many members try to help their connections (both hires and seekers) by sharing their posts with their own network to encourage a match. This presents a unique opportunity to empower our members to be matchmakers and connect their own connections to economic opportunities.

To make it even simpler for members to do so, now, when a hiring member posts a job on LinkedIn (or turns on #Hiring on their profile), their close connections will be notified and will be able to not only connect it with their own networks, but also directly connect both the hiring manager and seeker right on LinkedIn.  

What’s next: Community-powered hiring and job seeking is extremely powerful. We’re continuously looking for ways to help members easily build their network on LinkedIn and ask for help when they need it -- for hiring, job seeking, or any other professional job they are trying to get done. 

5 “Bite-size” learning to help you develop and grow

Learning has never been more important. Just this past year, members watched almost 50M hours of content on LinkedIn learning, up 50% compared to last year. And as members navigate the ever-changing nature of their work environment, they are looking for better and more personalized ways to learn -- after all, learning isn’t one size fits all. That’s why we’re always testing and exploring new types of content to help our members learn new skills. One such example is a new “bite-size” content type that includes a series of short-form videos from top creators on topics such as career wellness, job search, and even Excel, for example:

• Career Wellness Nano Tips with Shadé Zahrai
• Nano Tips for Using Excel with Miss Excel
• Nano Tips for a Bold Career with Akosua Boadi-Agyemang
• Job Interview Nano Tips with Madeline Mann
• Job Search Nano Tips with Jonathan Javier 

As we explore new learning formats, such as Office Hours and short-form videos, we are always looking to innovate and help learners. So please share any comments you have with us in the comments section.

Every day I’m amazed by the heart of the LinkedIn community and the incredible sense of purpose, passion, generosity, and humor that is showcased through conversations across the platform. I love seeing all the unique and inspiring posts－and I’m excited to share some of my favorites with you.  

---

Todd Lagerberg, a content producer at LinkedIn, celebrated the incredible customer service he experienced on American Airlines, and the head of customer service at AA, Alison Taylor, responds with appreciation.

Alex Wang, a data scientist, shares a video of herself trying out an AR copy and paste app as a way to share her learning journey with members.

Luc Zoratto, an Account Executive, shares his personal journey to prioritize mental health with his professional community, receiving tremendous support and inspiring many others to do the same.

Two great posts about why #representationmatters:

• Trina Nicole, a dancer and founder:

• Elfried Samba, Head of Social @ Gymshark:

With deep gratitude,

Tomer