Dan Roth, the former Fortune.com editor who took over as executive editor of LinkedIn last year, talked with TJ Raphael of Folio about how the social media site is delivering business news.
Here is an excerpt:
FOLIO: How should magazine publishers and editors be using LinkedIn outside of creating individual profiles for people or companies?
Dan Roth: There are a couple different ways. Number one, it helps to remember that LinkedIn is the professional social network—people come on there for one particular reason, which is to get news, information and insights that will help them with their jobs, careers and business. For every editor and writer, to capture the value of LinkedIn they should be posting links to every single article on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Today is our social business news site powered by an algorithm and by editors. We look at 1 million publishers during the course of a day to see what news they are publishing. The algorithm is powered by the LinkedIn InShare button—if you have an InShare button on your site then our algorithm is watching to see what people are sharing and we’re looking for certain signals. Editors are also looking to see what’s trending and we are working directly with publishers to see what they think are their hottest stories of the day and then we match those stories to the right professionals on a massive scale.
If you’re a publisher and you are feeding into LinkedIn, you have a chance to get your stories in front of the audience you want. I was the editor of Fortune before I came to LinkedIn — we would post stories and the comments would fill up with people saying things like ‘You’re liberal,’ ‘You’re conservative’ or ‘I make money at home stuffing envelopes and you can too!’ It was never someone saying, ‘I’m in this industry and your story is all wrong,’ or ‘I’ve tried this and here’s why it works.’ It’s because we weren’t getting our stories to the right people.
One of the amazing things about LinkedIn is we do get our stories to the right people — we know who wants to read what pieces. Publishers and editors should be making sure everything is fed into LinkedIn algorithmically by using InShare or systematically by making it part of your LinkedIn as soon as something publishes.
Read more here.
