LinkedIn expanded its publishing platform on Wednesday to allow all users the opportunity to write and share longform posts to their LinkedIn profile.
The network has long offered this publishing power to a hand-selected group of industry leaders, known as LinkedIn Influencers, but now all of the platform's members can publish work to their profile. The influencer posts do well, says LinkedIn's Head of Content Products Ryan Roslansky, generating nearly 31,000 views and more than 80 comments on average.
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The success of Influencer posts encouraged LinkedIn to extend the tool to the rest of the company's 277 million monthly active users.
"We're really excited to actually open up this publishing platform and start to draw some of that experience, knowledge, and insight out of these members and onto the LinkedIn platform to share at more of a massive scale," he added.
Users could always share links to third-party blogs or websites on LinkedIn, but the longform publishing tool was limited to Influencers.
Those with publishing power will see a small pencil icon to the right of their Share Box when signed into LinkedIn. Clicking on the pencil will open up a compose screen where users can edit things like font and size, or add links and titles. Once an article is published, it will be available to users as part of the publisher's public profile, and Roslansky says that LinkedIn will push some of the higher quality content to relevant audiences.

Users will see a pencil icon near the Share Box on LinkedIn which will allow them to publish longform blog posts or articles directly to their profile.
Image: LinkedIn
The change means that LinkedIn should experience an increase in user-generated content online. Not only will the site be open to posts from the general user base, but the company's Influencer community is also growing. LinkedIn added more than 50 new names to the Influencer list Wednesday, bringing the total number to "around 500 Influencers," according to a spokesperson.
Some of the new Influencers include Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Pfizer CEO Ian Read, financial expert and CNBC host Suze Orman, and Summly founder Nick D'Aloisio.
Wednesday's changes continue LinkedIn's push to get more users reading news on the platform. LinkedIn rebranded its news curation tool in Nov., and added Showcase Pages for brands to reach more targeted audiences less than a week later.
One of the benefits to limiting publishing power to Influencers was that it kept the clutter down, giving the most influential voices a unique privilege. Roslansky says opening up publishing to all users won't detract from the what the platform's Influencers have to say.
"At the end of the day, we've gotten to a point where there are so many people coming to LinkedIn to consume content where I really view this as a 'rising tide lifts all boats' type of phenomenon," he says. "The more content we have, the more content that's going to be consumed. So I really think this is going to be a [benefit] to the entire ecosystem."
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