The business-oriented service has long sought to be more than just a place to list your credentials. It offers sophisticated tools for recruiters and job seekers, networking features for professionals seeking new sales prospects, a Facebook-like service for posting status updates, and even a newsreading app called Pulse for busy people to scan the latest headlines.
Despite all that, use of the site has slowed recently. In the fourth quarter, the company had 139 million unique visitors to LinkedIn.com, essentially flat with the previous two quarters, according to comScore data. And the number of pages viewed by those visitors dropped to 10.6 billion, down from 11.6 billion in the third quarter.
Some of the decline is seasonal — fewer people are looking for jobs or actively hiring around the holidays — and some of it reflects a move to mobile apps. But the slowdown also reflects a perennial problem for LinkedIn: For most users, there is no compelling reason to visit the service unless they are actively job hunting.
With the new tool, which will be rolled out gradually to LinkedIn’s membership over the coming weeks, users will be able to write and publish posts longer than the 600-character maximum that exists for status updates now. The posts will initially be shared with people in each user’s network, but if they are popular and compelling enough, LinkedIn’s algorithms might send them out more broadly.
Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn, said the goal was to get people to share their great professional insights, benefiting their network of contacts while also building their own reputations as experts in their field.
“Sharing this knowledge on LinkedIn is important because it becomes part of your professional identity,” he said.
The tool is a complement to LinkedIn’s SlideShare tool, which allows users to share multimedia, including videos and slide presentations, with their contacts and the public, as well as to the status update feature, which is geared to sharing links.
The addition of longer posts could make LinkedIn more valuable to everyone. And it could give talented, thoughtful writers a way to break into the service’s Influencers program, which broadcasts posts by business leaders like Bill Gates and Martha Stewart. (That program is being expanded, LinkedIn said.)
But it’s also easy to imagine profiles getting bogged down with badly written white papers and other screeds best left unshared.