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How publishers are using LinkedIn tools for audience development

LinkedIn has been investing in its creator capabilities for years, as it recognizes the value of having creators on its platform. Between tools like its blogging platform and new advertising formats designed to reach relevant audiences, the network is building up a suite of features to keep audiences and individuals engaged with the content on the platform.

It seems to be working, too: LinkedIn’s internal stats show that 4.4% of its users engage with content in their LinkedIn feeds weekly.

For publishers, many of whom are looking to engage audiences both on and off their owned and operated sites, those tools are providing an opportunity to experiment with developing a new audience: the professional Millennial. This lucrative cohort is increasingly using LinkedIn in ways that provide publishers with potential touchpoints—and its tools are allowing publishers to bring them into their own ecosystems.

Juliet Beauchamp is the engagement editor at MIT Technology Review. She explained: “We know that our LinkedIn followers are, compared to our followers on other social media platforms, the most likely to convert into paid subscribers.

“There are two main creator tools I’m using to give our followers those opportunities: our LinkedIn newsletter and LinkedIn Lives. They both have a similar aim, which is to bring our LinkedIn followers into the MIT Technology Review ecosystem and move them down the funnel. But they have totally different formats.”

For MIT’s newsletter, for instance, which it uses to cross-promote its events and commercial partners, LinkedIn accounted for about 15% of its newsletter sign-ups via organic social in 2023.

The Pew Research Foundation found that 17% of people in the US seek ‘news’ on LinkedIn. While that only equates to about 5% of US adults, it is superior to Snapchat (4%) and WhatsApp (3%) in terms of people getting news on those platforms. 

More importantly, while other social platforms including Twitter/X and Meta are gradually reducing the amount of traffic they send to publishers’ desktop sites, LinkedIn is relatively stable as a source of traffic. It is an undeniably smaller source of referrals than those platforms, even now, but it speaks to a more consistent relationship between audience and news sources on LinkedIn.

It suggests that LinkedIn is a destination for news content in its own right—and one that publishers are increasingly paying attention to because the demographics that see it as a news source are critical to their own business models.

Pew also found, for example, that 53% of LinkedIn’s users have a combined household income of over $100,000. That level of income implies a higher level of disposable income and an educated demographic, conferring benefits to both publishers’ subscription and advertising capabilities.

Sharon Brooks, managing editor of the San Antonio Business Journal, told A Media Operator, “I believe that LinkedIn will be one of the four social media platforms our business uses moving forward. 

“I prefer LinkedIn to the others because we report on business news and LinkedIn is absolutely the most business-driven social media platform. Our advertisers are businesses, so LinkedIn works well as a venue for showing off our relevant content and our ability to provide exposure.”

Newsletters and engagement

One of LinkedIn’s primary areas of investment—cleverly riding the waves of content consumption elsewhere—is in newsletter tech. In the year to March 2024, LinkedIn reportedly saw a 150% increase in the number of newsletters from publishers and journalists; its editor-in-chief and vice president Dan Roth told Axios that the amount of newsletter subscribers publishers have on the platform “often dwarfs what they get on their own native newsletters.” 

The Economist’s forward-facing ‘week ahead’ trends newsletter, for example, reaches over 3.1 million weekly subscribers. 

But beyond creating that touchpoint, Beauchamp explained that there are a number of secondary benefits conferred by MIT Technology Review’s LinkedIn newsletters that help deepen audience engagement. She said: “About 40% of our LinkedIn followers also subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter. 

“They’re reminded that we have this product that they can read for free, and they can get a lot more context about a story than they would receive in a regular social post. By subscribing to this newsletter, they’ve demonstrated that they’re a more engaged follower, and they’re rewarded for that.”

She noted that the way LinkedIn notifies subscribers about new editions of the newsletter also means that MIT has a “more direct connection” with this section of our audience: “We’re less dependent on the algorithm surfacing our posts in our followers’ feeds”. Effectively, by using the newsletter tech, MIT is ameliorating some of the issues with using a third-party tool by sidestepping reliance on algorithms that are, at times, fickle. For publishers who are too used to being burnt by algorithm changes, that direct relationship, even on a third-party platform, is a major bonus. 

Brooks, too, said that the ability to reach users through a LinkedIn newsletter has allowed them to make the most of a direct relationship: “We make sure to include multiple links so readers can easily reach our website to read the stories mentioned in the roundup. This leads them to our website and results in some subscriptions for us. Our LinkedIn newsletter now has 9,775 subscribers and continues to attract more each week.”

That is a strategy employed by other business-focused publishers on LinkedIn. Business Insider, for instance, uses the LinkedIn newsletter tool to provide a condensed version of its Insider Today newsletter—which it uses as a marketing tool to entice people to sign up for the full version. By publishing the newsletter (even in part) on LinkedIn, publishers are creating a habit among their audiences that deepens their relationship with those lucrative audiences.

Once those users are signed up for the newsletters via LinkedIn, publishers benefit from using them to promote other paid-for products from their wider portfolio.

Additionally, since LinkedIn’s creator tools are available for individuals as much as for publishers, there is an opportunity for media companies to highlight the expertise of their journalists and editors. The Atlantic’s CEO Nick Thompson, for instance, fronts the brand on LinkedIn with his own monthly newsletter, which currently has 459,827 subscribers—and given its recent success in driving one million subscribers, you have to expect LinkedIn to be a contributor to that effort.

Lack of alignment

While LinkedIn’s tools are providing publishers with new opportunities, it is important to note that it is very much an outlier among social networks. Its users do not typically appreciate being blatantly upsold on there: as The Telegraph’s head of newsletters Maire Bonheim explains, it is best to use the article and newsletter to demonstrate what the reader can get more of on a publishers’ own site: “I don’t think people are subscribing to The Telegraph because of a marketing offer message. In almost all cases, it’s because they’ve, they’ve just read incredible journalism, and they want to subscribe on the basis of that.”

She also noted that the team has found producing a newsletter specifically for LinkedIn—instead of repurposing existing newsletter content—leads to better growth in subscriptions on LinkedIn as well as traffic to the Telegraph’s site. As a result, publishers looking to use LinkedIn’s tools should be aware that it requires investment in terms of content creation and strategy, just as with any platform.

Additionally, with its extremely narrow focus on business and work, publishers need to be aware that irrelevant content is unlikely to find an audience there: When Harvard Business Review launched a Covid-focused LinkedIn Live show in 2020, for example, it did so with a focus on the impact of the pandemic on working life and business.

More fundamentally, as a third-party platform, LinkedIn’s priorities may not always align with those of publishers. Even the publishers whose content is most relevant to LinkedIn’s business-orientated audiences cannot assume it will always be a source of traffic for them. Beauchamp explained: “I doubt it’s a secret to anyone in the media industry that platforms and their algorithms can change seemingly at whim, and a strategy that’s worked for ages can suddenly become a nonstarter. 

“While LinkedIn is certainly a large focus for us right now, we also make sure to experiment with new and emerging social media platforms. I’d absolutely encourage publishers to experiment on LinkedIn if they haven’t yet. But it certainly isn’t our only priority”.

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