LinkedIn Outlines Next Steps for Its Collaborative Articles Option

LinkedIn’s AI-powered “Collaborative Articles” have been a big winner for the app, with millions of users contributing their expertise and insights to its AI-generated prompts, helping to give members additional promotion, and provide LinkedIn with more content.

Collaborative Articles are powered by AI, with LinkedIn’s system coming up with industry-specific questions, then prompting experts to add their thoughts.

Which then highlights those contributors, helping them boost their presence with interested readers, while there’s also the added incentive of getting a Community Top Voice badge in a key skill area, as a result of your Collaborative Article contributions.

So on balance, it makes sense why LinkedIn users would want to add their insight to these prompts, and indeed, Collaborative Articles have seen a 4x increase in weekly member contributions quarter-over-quarter, with, cumulatively, over 10 million contributions in the past year.

And today, LinkedIn has outlined the next steps to evolve the option.

First off, LinkedIn says that it’s improving the framing of its Collaborative Article prompts, in order to get more specific answers.

As per LinkedIn:

“One recent example has been writing articles that start with a situation you might find yourself in at work, then framing a problem statement / question based on that. Here’s one example: “You’re a new supervisor. How do you earn the respect of your team?”

In addition to this, LinkedIn has also added a new “unhelpful” button which will enable readers to notify LinkedIn’s team about contributions that may not be so great. The feature is in early testing at present.

LinkedIn’s also working to improve its Collaborative Article algorithms, to ensure the right experts are being prompted to contribute, while it’s also looking to expand the reach of Collaborative Article contributions within contributor feeds.

“We’ve improved how we distribute contributions in members’ feeds and notifications, showing members the most relevant ones for their careers — and have seen a 316% weekly increase in members reacting to contributions since September.”

Which is probably a more pertinent question of the format. Sure, LinkedIn is seeing a lot of people keen to contribute to Collaborative Articles., in order to show off their expertise, and get that LinkedIn “Expert” badge for adding their thoughts. But are people really reading these AI stimulated posts?

Evidently, they are, with LinkedIn noting that weekly readership of Collaborative Articles has increased by over 270% since September.

So it’s pretty much a win-win for the platform, with generative AI prompts getting more members to contribute their thoughts, and more readers then engaging with the content.

On balance, it could actually be the best use of generative AI yet within a social media app.

LinkedIn’s also now expanding Collaborative Articles to more languages, with German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and French contributions now supported.

Finally, LinkedIn is also adding a Collaborative Article filter in search to help users find more relevant insights, and articles to contribute to.

It still feels like an odd format to me, in prompting LinkedIn members to contribute their thoughts based on a bot simulated query. But evidently, it works, and LinkedIn’s now looking for ways that it can double down on the format, and maximize engagement and activity.

And if people are reading, as LinkedIn says, it may well be a huge winner for the app.