LinkedIn Aims Towards Being an Educational Social Network

A lot of people when they hear LinkedIn immediately start thinking about a social network good enough for finding a job or replacing your CV. Certainly, these things would have been true a few years back, but apparently, starting with today, LinkedIn aims towards being an educational and professional social network. Let’s see why.

Slideshare in the LinkedIn family

After buying Slideshare, they’ve started developing this platform as one of the most important ones on the market when it comes to presentations. What are presentations? A visual format of marketing content presenting a concept/ idea/ subject in a simplified form – be it a simple presentation, infographic or video.

Then Slideshare offered the possibility of presentation analytics and even inside creation. Today, Slideshare is one of the best tools when it comes to social media B2B.

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LinkedIn Pulse and Publishing

LinkedIn realized the importance of the content offered to its users, so it developed Linkedin Pulse – a system through which users can „consume” news and updates from different fields (emphasized on the mobile app).

And because LinkedIn wanted to make its users create more content on the network, they’ve launched the possibility of publishing posts. So they first selected a series of international influencers (Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Jeff Haden, Dharmesh Shah, Bernard Marr, Liz Ryan, John C Abell, etc.) and launched for a period of time the Influencers program (some of those are now also influencers on Slideshare).

The responsibility of these people was to promote this new feature (a movement copied by Medium, well known today as a publishing platform). And now, this publishing feature has become popular amongst many users. Unfortunately, the influencers program has ended and will not accept any more proposals.

Lynda.com in the LinkedIn family

The last acquisition made by Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO was buying the educational platform lynda.com (for 1.5 billion dollars).
He made the announcement today through a LinkedIn post (d’oh!)

With today’s announcement that LinkedIn intends to acquire lynda.com, LinkedIn has taken a material step forward toward connecting these dots. You can learn more here about the details of today’s announcement…Together, we can bring opportunities and access to knowledge that everyone deserves. And together, we can more easily build the Economic Graph by mapping together the people, jobs, skills, and knowledge that are core components of it….

We can now honestly say that LinkedIn is the official platform when it comes to professionalism and education.

I recommend you take 3 minutes to watch the video in order to get a better understanding of LinkedIn’s current vision.

We can clearly see how social networks are starting to niche more and more: Facebook wants to own everything that is Internet (do not believe that launching Messenger is just a PR movement), Instagram wants to monopolize everything that means Photo App, Twitter aims more and more towards search engine and live streaming, Google unofficially gives up Google+ and Snapchat wants to develop an artificial intelligence that analyzes the behavior of the users who upload photos and videos.

I recommend you start using and seeing LinkedIn as more than a job hunting network or a CV presentation.

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