LinkedIn Rolls Out New Tools to Give Creators More Ways to Share Visual Content

By Aisha Malik

LINKEDIN ANNOUNCED RECENTLY

that it’s rolling out new features for creators that are designed to make it easier to share visual content on the social network. The launch marks LinkedIn’s latest eff ort toward building out a platform for creating content and courting creators.

In the coming weeks, creators on LinkedIn will be able to add a clickable link directly onto their images and videos to drive traffi c to their websites or other resources, regardless of whether they’re on or off LinkedIn. For example, the company notes that creators can use the new feature to link to their most recent newsletters or their personal websites. You can add a clickable link by tapping the “Add a link” icon after creating a new post on mobile with an image or video.

The company is also launching a new Templates feature that is designed to help creators ensure that their text posts will stand out in users’ feeds. The Templates are designed to give text posts a pop of color to make them more visually pleasing and eye-catching for viewers. Creators will be able to access the new Templates in the coming weeks by going to the share box or tapping “Post” on mobile and then selecting “Use a template.” From there, you can choose from numerous customizable backgrounds and fonts, add your own text and hit “Share.” You can even add a clickable link onto templates.

In addition, LinkedIn has starting rolling out “Carousels,” which is a new content format that allows you to mix images and videos when presenting information to your followers in a swipeable format. LinkedIn says users will start seeing carousels in their Feed today. The company plans to tweak the feature and release it more widely later this year.

T h e launch of the new f e a t u r e s comes as L i n k e d I n says it’s seen a 20% i n c r e a s e year over year in p e o p l e a d d i n g v i s u a l content in their posts.

L i n k e d I n has ramped up eff orts to court creators to its platform over the past year and even launched a $25 million creator fund in September 2021. When LinkedIn launched the fund, the idea of starting a fund to incentivize creators to build video for a particular platform wasn’t exactly new, considering platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook had all announced hundreds of millions of dollars in

creator funds to bring more original content to their platforms long before LinkedIn.

Although LinkedIn has 830 million users, it houses content that is vastly diff erent from what you fi nd on TikTok and Instagram. However, that hasn’t stopped the platform from trying to court creators and position itself as a home for creating content.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/ linkedin-tools-helping-creators-post-visualcontent/?utm_medium=techbriefi ng.us.fri. rd.20220812.436.1&utm_source=email&utm_ content=article&utm_campaign=email-2022 Image credit: Studio Kennon

LinkedIn $25 Million Creator Fund

WHEN LINKEDIN fi rst launched Stories format, and later expanded its tools for creators earlier this year, one noticeable detail was that the Microsoftowned network for professionals hadn’t built any kind of obvious monetization into the program — noticeable, given that creators earn a living on other platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and those apps had lured creators, their content and their audiences in part by paying out.

“As we continue to listen to feedback from our members as we consider future opportunities, we’ll also continue to evolve how we create more value for our creators,” is how LinkedIn explained its holding pattern on payouts to me at the time. But that strategy may have backfi red for the company — or at least may have played a role in what came next: last month, LinkedIn announced it would be scrapping its Stories format and going back to the proverbial drawing board to work on other short-form video content for the platform.

Now comes the latest iteration in that eff ort. To bring more creators to the platform, the company today announced that it would be launching a new $25 million creator fund, which initially will be focused around a new Creator Accelerator Program.

It’s coming on the heels of LinkedIn also continuing to work on one of its other new-content experiments: a Clubhouse-style live conversation platform. As we previously reported, LinkedIn began working on this back in March of this year. Now, we are hearing that the feature will make an appearance as part of a broader events strategy for the company very soon.

“We’ll be starting to test audio with a small pilot group in the coming weeks,” said Chris Szeto, senior director of product at LinkedIn, who heads up its audio eff orts. “Given the trends in virtual, hybrid events we are also working on making audio part of our overall event strategy rather than a standalone off ering, so that we can give people more choice about how they want to run and engage with their audiences.”

Notably, in a blog post announcing the creator fund, LinkedIn also listed a number of creator events coming up. Will the Clubhouse-style feature pop up there? Watch this space. Or maybe… listen up. In any case, the creator accelerator that LinkedIn is announcing today is part of a bigger eff ort it’s been making to build out a platform for creating content. That has included building new tools and acquiring companies like Jumprope (a platform devised to make “how-to” videos) earlier this year. Together with the accelerator, the idea that LinkedIn wants to encourage more dynamic and lively set of voices to get more people talking and spending time on LinkedIn.

Andrei Santalo, global head of community at LinkedIn, noted in the blog post that the accelerator/ incubator will be focused on the many ways that

LinkedIn from page 39

one can engage on LinkedIn.

“Creating content on LinkedIn is about creating opportunity, for yourselves and others,” he writes. “How can your words, videos and conversations make 774+ million professionals better at what they do or help them see the world in new ways?”

The incubator will last for 10 weeks and will take on 100 creators in the U.S. to coach them on building content for LinkedIn. It will also give them chances to network with like-minded individuals (naturally… it is LinkedIn), as well as a $15,000 grant to do their work. The deadline for applying (which you do here) is October 12.

The idea of starting a fund to incentivize creators to build video for a particular platform is defi nitely not new — and that is one reason why it was overdue for LinkedIn to think about its own approach.

Leading social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook and YouTube all have announced hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts in the form of creator funds to bring more original content to their platforms.

You could argue that for mass-market social media sites, it’s important to pay creators because competition is so fi erce among them for consumer attention.

But on the other hand, those platforms have appeal for creators because of the potential audience size. At 774 million users, LinkedIn isn’t exactly small, but the kind of content that tends to live on there is so diff erent, and maybe drier — it’s focused on professional development, work and “serious” topics — that perhaps it might need the most fi nancial incentive of all to get creators to bite.

LinkedIn’s bread and butter up to now has been around professional development: people use it to look for work, to get better jobs, to hire people, and to connect with people who might help them get ahead in their professional lives.

But it’s done so in a very prescribed set of formats that do not leave much room for exploring “authenticity” — not in the modern sense of “authentic self”, and not in the more old-school sense of just letting down your guard and being yourself. (Even relatively newer initiatives like its education focus directly play into this bigger framework.)

With authenticity becoming an increasing priority for people — and maybe more so as we have started to blur the lines between work and home because of COVID-19 and the changes that it has forced on us — I can’t help but wonder whether LinkedIn will use this opportunity to rethink, or at least expand the concept of, what it means to spend time on its platform. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/14/linkedin-islaunching-its-own-25m-fund-and-incubator-forcreators/ https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ linkedinforcreators/ Image credit: LinkedIn China via Weibo

https://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-developsreinvented-toilet-with-gates-foundation/

Samsung announced that it has developed a new toilet that recycles and safely disposes of human waste in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The company's advanced research arm

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology

had been working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2019. The institute recently completed the development of core technologies and made a prototype of the toilet that has gone through a user test, Samsung said.

According to the South Korean tech giant, the toilet, aimed for household use that meets the performance requirements of the foundation, comes with heat-treatment and bioprocessing technologies to kill pathogens from human waste and the released material is safe for the environment.

The treated water can be fully recycled, while the solid waste is dried and combusted to ash and the liquid waste is purified, Samsung said. The company added that it plans to offer licenses of patents related to the toilet for free to developing countries during commercialization.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90784573/best-freeonline-classes

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Coursera is similar to EdX, although it does have a dedicated free courses section. Compared to EdX, Coursera skews a bit more toward professional training, but it’s likely you’ll be able to find a fair amount of overlap if you look hard enough.

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