LinkedIn Launches Collaborative Articles for Crowdsourced Expertise
Source: LinkedIn
Source: LinkedIn
Collaborative Articles are a new type of article that combines AI-powered conversation starters and prompts with community perspectives and insights.
Using AI, LinkedIn's editorial team has developed a number of articles based on topics that align with in-demand skills such as social media, leadership, marketing strategy, and brand development, according to its data. Members (currently on an invite-only basis) can participate by responding to the prompts and sharing their lessons, anecdotes, and advice based on their real-life knowledge and experiences. Contributors can earn a new Community Top Voice badge when they become one of the most insightful contributors for a particular skill, as well as benefit from increased reach.
Why They Matter
Collaborative Articles bring a Quora aspect to LinkedIn, where people can share their knowledge and responses that are crowdsourced from topical experts.
They also remind me of features like TikTok's Stitch and Instagram's Add Yours. While different in content format, these features lower the barrier to entry for content creation. Instead of having to come up with a new idea to post about, you can easily contribute by adding your own take. Plus, they also promote co-creation, help people come together around topics and interests, and can drive user engagement — just like Collaborative Articles.
Contributing to Collaborative Articles can be a great way to showcase your expertise while giving back to the LinkedIn community. It can also be an additional touchpoint for getting in front of your target audience and networking with like-minded individuals that can lead to business and other economic opportunities.
The launch of Collaborative Articles reflects insights that LinkedIn recently uncovered in a member survey, which indicated that people want more content based on insights, ideas, and inspiration that can help them with their professional careers.
Future Possibilities
Depending on how popular Collaborative Articles become over time, it would be interesting if LinkedIn built an advertising solution into it, where brands could serve relevant ads on these articles. This, then, could lead to some type of revenue share with contributors that could incentive members to contribute along with some of the current benefits.
