Why LinkedIn should be your new homepage

LinkedIn recently announced their new social news platform for professionals, called LinkedIn Today. This platform is essentially a daily digest of all the information that your network, your peers or your industry is reading right now.

With this release they have turned LinkedIn into a true daily destination. It is a critical step to becoming more Facebook like – at least in terms of how much time users spend on the site (the average Facebook users spends over 7 hours a month on the site!). For LinkedIn this will translate to more users, more engagement and of course more opportunities to monetize the traffic.

The notion of news curation is nothing new. In fact, we are all curators of news – we do it in our daily lives. Have you ever asked someone “did you see that story about the latest…? You have to check it out!” This notion of personal news curation adds value to the people we interact with, starts new conversations and exposes our interests in unique ways.

With LinkedIn Today they’ve taken a conversation that would happen when we see friends, colleagues, clients and partners and exposes it across your entire network and the networks of those in the industries you care about. In the process you learn not just about news, but also what matters to your network and the individuals it represents.

We’ve established this is a great source of relevant news but it is also a valuable fact-finding, engagement, networking  and awareness generation tool. Let’s look at each one:

1. Fact Finding: As news bubbles to the top of LinkedIn Today you not only see the content but also the individuals that shared it. This is valuable source of information for any sales rep or client manager trying to build a more meaningful relationship or looking for an opportunity to engage.
2. Engagement: Sharing out a news item implies a level of interest. Someone took time to post a message to his or her entire network that this piece of information was interesting. In return you have the opportunity to engage directly with that individual either by commenting back, or indirectly, by sharing that article out as well showing that you have shared interests.
3. Networking: Part of exploring a news story is seeing who shared it. This group will be made up of individuals you are connected with directly as well as those that you might wish to connect to. For those professionals looking to expand their network this exposure of content + connections is yet another way you can start to expand your own personal network.
4. Awareness Generation: Now that LinkedIn has over 100mm users it is more important than ever to establish and grow your presence on LinkedIn. If you’re producing valuable content for your industry and network be sure to include a LinkedIn Share button so the rest of LinkedIn can discover you and your great content.

Although the notion of content curation is nothing new, LinkedIn has found a way to make it all the more valuable for professionals. We rely on people we trust to help make critical decisions and seeing the sources they view as important will only help to deepen those relationships and discover new ones.