Business news publishers see traffic spike from LinkedIn

Business news companies are seeing a traffic spike from LinkedIn, writes Max Willens of Digiday.

Willens writes, “Forbes — which has over 4 million followers on LinkedIn and is adding about 150,000 new followers per month — recently had a record month in April on the platform, with over 1 million clicks on its stories, according to Lewis D’Vorkin, Forbes’ chief product officer. This was nearly 120 percent more than the traffic it drove the previous April, he added.

“D’Vorkin attributes a lot of that success to sharing aspirational, advice content that’s ripe for the LinkedIn audience. ‘We over-index, perhaps, on the right content for LinkedIn compared to Facebook,’ he said. ‘People know Forbes is about success, not just in business and entrepreneurship, but in all sorts of ways. That’s so ripe for the LinkedIn audience.’

“Elsewhere, Business Insider now reliably draws about 2 million clicks per month from the platform, though in a good month it can garner over 4 million. That’s not a lot for a publisher that gets over 55 million uniques a month, per comScore, but LinkedIn now drives more clicks for Business Insider’s finance coverage than Facebook does. That’s partly because LinkedIn’s audience, while quite a bit smaller than Facebook’s, is much more interested in that kind of information, according to Ashley Lutz, Business Insider’s deputy executive editor.”

Read more here.