LinkedIn Launches Audio Events and New Creator Tools

By Danica Lo

OVER THE PAST YEAR, more than 10 million people have activated LinkedIn’s Creator Mode. The setting, launched last fall, gives users

access to content creation and live streaming tools including LinkedIn Live and newsletters. Today, LinkedIn expands its creator tool off erings by debuting audio events and profi le enhancements, pivoting the professional networking platform further into the creator economy.

Emerging from six months of beta-testing, LinkedIn’s audio events gives users the ability to schedule and host discussions, interviews, and other conversations—not dissimilar to apps and tools such as Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Later this month, users will also be able to add a hyperlink to the tops of their profi les, create a shareable follow link for promotional use on other platforms, automatically gain followers from incoming connection requests, and experience enhanced discovery via LinkedIn homepage feeds and via search.

“Since fi rst launching Creator Mode last March, we’ve been excited to see the rapid adoption of our suite of creator tools—everything from newsletters to audio events to enhanced analytics,” Keren Baruch, product lead for creator strategy at LinkedIn, tells Fast Company. “What’s most exciting to watch is how creators are leveraging the diff erent content tools to tell their stories in their own unique ways to spark member engagement.”

Along with these new creator tools and products, users may notice their homepage feeds evolving as the LinkedIn team continues to focus on event discoverability, notifi cations, and scheduling—via enhanced RSVP tools, the ability to add LinkedIn events to personal calendars, and easier-to-fi nd, browsable event listings.

In line with the global creator economy surge— link-in-profi le company Linktree estimates there are 200 million monetized digital content creators worldwide—LinkedIn reports its users increasingly self-identify as content-makers.

In December 2021, more than 144,000 LinkedIn members included the word “creator” in their job titles—representing a 48% increase from prepandemic 2019. The job market has responded in kind—in the fi rst four months of 2022, LinkedIn has seen more than 65,000 job listings with the word “creator” in the title, three times the number of creator job posts over the same period in 2021.

As for demographics, since 2015, women creators have grown 300% on LinkedIn—a statistic driven by the growth in Gen Z women creators, which LinkedIn reports has grown more than 1,000 % in the past seven years. https://www.fastcompany.com/90759390/linkedinaudio-events

Image credit: https://www.linkedin.com