Photo Courtesy of LinkedIn
Last week was the beta launch of LinkedIn’s news aggregator called LinkedIn Today. “LinkedIn Today allows members to access their professional news through three different lenses – by their connections, industry, and the broader global professional network.” In other words, it takes the articles, blog posts and press releases that the 90 million people on LinkedIn (in addition to those in your network) are most interested in and tweeting about and puts them on one page for easy viewing by topic, location and by any of the 22 industries you are interested in following.
It’s a genius idea and will quickly be added (alongside Ragan’s PR Daily) to the list of places I go on a daily basis to keep up on the latest news in my industry. Not only can I customize my news by topic or industry, but I can also decide what publications or news sources I would like to follow and it will pull all new content along with the most “shared” headlines from that source. If I only have a few minutes to catch up on news, I can see what the thought leaders in my industry are viewing the most all on one page. Not to mention, I can save articles I don’t have time to read during the day and LinkedIn’s new app allows me to read them on my iPhone on my way to and from work.
In the past, LinkedIn was hard for PR Professionals to tap into because you had to be a member of a group or “connected” with someone for them to actually see your news. The greatest thing about LinkedIn Today is that it opens the network up so you can share your company’s news on Twitter, Facebook and several other social media sites and it will automatically pull it into your industry’s news for everyone on LinkedIn Today that follows your industry.
Our Press Release Distribution Service, CisionWire, has recently added a tool that allows you to share your press releases on your LinkedIn account, but now this same tool will give anyone who uses CisionWire to distribute and optimize press releases online the ability to share their company news with the entire network of professionals on LinkedIn Today.
