Friday 22nd March: Leveraging LinkedIn: a guide for media companies

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I’ve seen a fair few pieces on ‘How to make the most of LinkedIn’ over the last 12 months or so. Most exude a sense of defeat - ‘well, if Twitter’s screwed, we might as well try LinkedIn’. But this from Damian Radcliffe is well researched, as always, and puts up an enthusiastic argument for adopting LinkedIn as a traffic driver.

Damian starts with three solid reasons why LinkedIn could be good for your publishing business: it’s user base is bigger than you think; it’s younger than you think, and they are starting to use the platform for news. Add in a solid gender balance and high educational attainment and that’s starting to sound like a very attractive audience.

Next up are five ways to make the most of the world’s favourite professional online platform. I expected to see newsletters, news posts, subscription referrals and live events on the list. However, I hadn’t ever really considered LinkedIn as a place to generate audience insights, and not just from analytics. “Some of our most important insights come from the comments,” Meredith Turits, former editor of BBC Worklife, told Nieman Lab last year.

Toolkits has an updated publisher subscription rankings, and if you’re curious just how many digital subscriptions individual publishers have managed to sell, this is the post for you. The New York Times tops the chart, of course, with a squillion paid subs, but the middle of the table is much more interesting. The Wall Street Journal is smashing and The Economist, The FT and Barrons have all passed the million milestone… specialist info FTW!

We were talking about the woeful state of freelance rates on the podcast a couple of weeks back. This survey confirms everything we feared. Freelancing advocate Anna Codrea-Rado said: “The ALCS report hammers home a harsh reality: freelance journalism pay cannot sustain a livelihood. It doesn’t for me, nor scores of my freelance colleagues.”

Digiday (remember them?) is reporting that Fortune is seeing an opportunity to extend its Fortune 500 lists, events franchises, digital reach – as well as its magazine – to an audience of business executives and advertisers in Europe. “That C-suite audience is gold. It’s a really important audience to reach,“ said Fortune’s managing director of Europe, Jim Jacovides.

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