Creators’ Edition: newsletters enhancements, SEO, analytics & more + Inspiring conversations about building character, finding your next play, AR & AI

Every few weeks, I share new products and experiments that seem to be working — or not!— to give you some ideas for what we’re building, why we’re building it, and how we operate; I’d love your feedback on everything! – Tomer 

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Welcome to the first edition of Building LinkedIn for 2023! I am excited to shake things up a bit this year by focusing each edition on a particular professional audience and addressing the needs they may have. To kick things off, we're highlighting unique product opportunities for creators. Whether it's providing an outlet to share your craft or knowledge, or establishing connections with like-minded professionals, the platform can be a powerful tool for growing your voice and influence. In every edition, I'll be co-authoring this newsletter with one of my product leaders, so you'll be getting more insight as well.

Ok, back to what’s happening at LinkedIn.

At the beginning of every calendar year, we see members coming back from the holiday break with renewed energy looking to grow their career & business. This year was no different. We once again saw record momentum with 900 million members worldwide (over 80% of members are outside of the US). Quite notably and relevant to today’s edition, we continuously see more and more members come to the platform to find and share professional knowledge and advice with newsletter creation up 10X year-over-year.

As macroeconomic conditions remain unpredictable, we’re continuously looking for ways to provide support to those looking for a new role. Recently we published our 2023 Jobs on the Rise report. This list of 25 fastest-growing job titles in 28 countries provides great insight into the economy, what employers are looking for, and future careers. For those interested in pursuing those careers, we unlocked over 60 LinkedIn Learning courses to learn the skills necessary. The top fastest-growing job titles:

1. Head of Revenue Operations
2. HR Analytics Manager
3. Diversity and Inclusion Manager
4. Truck Driver
5. Employee Experience Manager

And now, on to our product updates. This section was authored by Keren Baruch, our Director of Product, who shares a few of the ways we’re improving the experience for creators who are looking to share their craft and knowledge to inspire & help other professionals.

1 Feature your newsletter & grow your subscribers with one-click

Newsletters have become an invaluable part of the knowledge-sharing that our members love about LinkedIn, and helping authors find the right audience for their insights is something we’re always trying to improve. With that in mind, we’re introducing some new ways to make driving subscriptions to a Newsletter even easier: more prominent placement on an author’s profile, and new shareable subscription-driving links. 

First, all newly-created newsletters are getting a great discoverability boost - we’re automatically giving Newsletters a featured placement on their author’s profile, making it even easier for members to find and subscribe to newsletters straight from the author’s profile. If you already have an existing newsletter, you can simply use the Featured capability on your profile to showcase it. 

Also, authors will appreciate our new one-click subscribe URLs and embeddable buttons. Whether shared on social media, email, or a website, these tools make it easy for readers to find and subscribe to the author's newsletter. When readers click the link or button, they will be taken through a simple process--log in to their LinkedIn account (if they aren't already logged in), and then subscribe. This streamlined process will help authors grow their audiences with ease.

2 Help members find & discover your content on & off platform 

We're continuing to invest in new ways to make content created by our members more visible both on- and off-platform. Now we’ve got two new ways to improve that visibility: one to make Newsletters more discoverable on LinkedIn, and another to improve the way our members’ content will appear in external search engines. 

Easier discovery of Newsletters in search results. All newsletters will now appear prominently in search results under their name. This change will make it even easier for members to find and subscribe to Newsletters from authors whose insights they value.

Improved search engine discovery for articles. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important way to grow an audience and increase your visibility off LinkedIn. Members can now customize SEO titles and descriptions to control how articles show up on search engines, and in the process, make it easier for others to find their content. The process is simple, too. Authors can look at any article they’ve created, click on the “Publishing menu” in the top left corner, and click “Settings” to begin customizing how they’d like their SEO title and description to appear in searches.

3 Drive richer engagement with your content using clickable links 

Whether it’s traffic to your site or other resources, we’re making it much easier to get richer engagement on your next image or video post. Now, members can drive action directly from clickable links overlaid on their content. The examples from creators below provide examples of making content actionable for audiences. 

4 A central place to discover analytics & content tools

In recent months, we’ve shared some of the new performance and creation tools we’ve been busy rolling out for our members. But even as these capabilities came online, we knew we needed a simple way for members to access these tools more easily.  

In the next few weeks, we’ll introduce the new analytics and tools page - giving members one place to access the performance insights and creator tools they need to engage and build their audience: find detailed audience insights, profile views, and post-performance alongside access to creator tools, all in one place. And as we continue to build more creation resources and more ways to understand your engagement, you’ll know exactly where to find them. 

5 Plan your content with article scheduling 

Following our recent launch of scheduled posts, we’re excited to announce the upcoming launch of scheduled articles. Soon article and Newsletter authors can utilize the same pre-scheduling tools that we’ve enabled for posts - crafting long-form content while maintaining their planned publishing cadence, all natively on LinkedIn.

Every day I’m amazed by the heart of the LinkedIn community and the incredible sense of purpose, passion, generosity, and humor that is showcased through conversations across the platform. I love seeing all the unique and inspiring posts－and I’m excited to share some of my favorites with you.  

Arthur Bouffard, an AR developer, shares a cool augmented reality experience he created using several publicly available tools. In his post & comments, he provides insight & guidance into how others can innovate & build their own creations as well.

Lior Sinclair, a Founder & ML Engineer, shares often about recent AI learnings and breakthroughs. In this post, he shares an example and code created by Diego Vicente Martín about how self-organizing maps can be used to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Adam Broda, a Founder & Career coach, shares a 9-step coaching guide to help people recently laid off get ready for the next opportunity. His post was greatly appreciated by the LinkedIn community and was re-posted over 500 times by others.

Sahil Bloom, an Author & Managing Partner, shares the character alarm framework which is a simple way to integrate Character Invention into your daily life. It is based on learnings from executive coach Eric Partaker.

Shintaro Katafuchi, a Software Engineer, was recently assigned to support engineers who’d be laid off at his company in Japan. He shared a post in Japanese to ask if anyone is hiring, and got nearly many responses from his community and over 50 shares from companies, recruiters, and individuals offering help.

With deep gratitude,

Tomer