Tuesday 15th September: How The Economist tripled the number of subs it gets from LinkedIn

September 15, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

The Economist has narrowed the focus on what it publishes to LinkedIn and tripled the number of subscribers it gets from the professional networking site in the process. The weekly's social editors select just nine business and finance stories to go out on platform each day, scheduled for similar times to help build audience habit.

The switch to publishing only a selection of business and finance content led to a 39.5% jump in followers over the last year. With 11.4 million fans on the professional networking site, second only to Twitter in terms of social media headcount, LinkedIn is The Economist's third biggest biggest social media subscription driver.

“LinkedIn has changed over the last couple of years, it’s moved from a platform where you would get a job to [becoming] more content-focused,” Jack Lahart, head of social media at The Economist told Digiday.

If only some of LinkedIn's 'influencers' would catch on to The Economist's less-is-more content strategy.

The Media Voices team (that's us) have opened entries for the second year of the Publisher Podcast Awards, with submissions open until Friday November 27th 2020. We've added six new categories this year. Find out which categories fit your podcasts best and get your entries in sharpish... It's FREE TO ENTER!!!

The editor-in-chief of British GQ, Dylan Jones, has told CNBC he’s not worried about the future of his print publication. Despite distribution challenges, and the loss of travel sales, he says "we’ve seen massive uplifts in supermarkets, which is a place where traditionally we don’t sell well.”

I can't imagine this is anywhere near the end of this story, not least because the White House is involved. But for today, Oracle has beaten Microsoft in the bidding to become TikTok's 'trusted tech' partner and save the U.S. operations of the video-sharing app.

This week's podcast:

This episode Josh Schollmeyer, co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of online men’s magazine MEL, takes us through working at the legacy print behemoth Playboy, why that convinced him men’s magazines needed to change and the branded media business model that is at the heart of MEL’s success.

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