Economist has tripled its subscribers from LinkedIn

The Economist is driving subscribers from LinkedIn by posting business and financial news on the social media site and then posting everything, reports Lucinda Southern of Digiday.

Southern writes, “After switching gears on its content strategy — starting narrow to publish just business and finance coverage, then going broad by posting all its coverage and then back to a more selective publishing process — it’s grown its followers 39.5% over the last year to 11.4 million. LinkedIn is second only to Twitter in terms of social media platform follower count (it has over 25 million Twitter followers across several accounts).

“Of social platforms, LinkedIn is the publisher’s third-biggest subscription driver. The amount of organic traffic that LinkedIn refers back to The Economist site — where people can register to access several articles before subscribing — has doubled year over year. And subscriptions to The Economist generated organically from LinkedIn have tripled year on year, although it wouldn’t say from what base.

“As the platform has changed over the last decade, so has the publisher’s understanding of what works.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.