Over 1 Million Expert Answers: What’s New with Collaborative Articles

It’s been just over 6 months since we started to roll out collaborative articles — a new way for experts to share their knowledge, and for the 950M+ members on LinkedIn to learn from them. It’s our way of bringing together the best of AI and the nearly 10 billion years of experience that our members have, to create a world-class resource for every major work problem… covering everything from calming your nerves before public speaking to creating data visualizations for smart homes. 

Just two weeks ago, we crossed our 1 millionth expert contribution, with growth accelerating nearly every week over the last few months. But above all else, what excites me is who the experts contributing to these articles are: they run the gamut from senior leaders and executives, to individual contributors who have unique “been there, done that” stories to share. 

And just as more experts have started contributing their expertise, more readers have started using collaborative articles as their go-to starting points for answering their work problems — we’ve seen 74% growth in the last month alone in articles being read by members. In fact, collaborative articles are now the fastest growing traffic driver to LinkedIn.

As we cross this 6 month milestone, I want to share some of the new features we’ve rolled out specifically with experts like you in mind, to make it even easier and more rewarding to share your knowledge with the world. Take a look and try things out by visiting linkedin.com/advice!

New look and feel

We’ve made it much easier for you to add your insights to articles, and for our LinkedIn community to read through and engage with your contributions:

• New web layout that puts the emphasis on you: The real gold in a collaborative article is your “been there, done that” stories, so we adjusted the layout of the articles to put greater focus on your contributions vs. the AI-powered text. Similar changes are coming to mobile soon!
• More reactions: Members can now react to your contribution from the full reaction set on LinkedIn (insightful, like, celebrate, etc). You can also now see who the people reacting to your contributions are, and members can follow you directly from your contributions too.
• New “Top Contributors” section: If members found you to be one of the most noteworthy contributors in an article, you will now be featured at the top of the article.
• Better browsing for readers: A better browsing experience for readers leads to more people seeing your contributions. Our new design allows members to easily explore multiple contributions, and new cross-article hyperlinking allows members to easily jump from one article to the next. 

Better articles and matches

With so many different work topics and industries, you told us you needed help pinpointing the most relevant articles that you should contribute to. We’ve been constantly improving both the quality of the articles, as well as the matches we make for you: 

• Better articles: We work closely with our editorial team to continuously improve the quality of the AI-powered article text and titles — you’ll start to see a lot more depth in the articles we recommend to you.
• Share your preferences: You can now explicitly pick the skills you want to contribute to by filling in the “Top Skills” section of your profile, which you can also access from the collaborative articles carousel you see at the top of your feed. 
• Learning from your other work: If you are posting, writing articles, or commenting on LinkedIn, we’re now able to leverage that to better understand what you’re interested in sharing expertise on, and recommend related collaborative articles. And the same applies for contributions — the more you contribute, the better our recommendations become!
• Find even more articles to contribute to: We refreshed linkedin.com/advice to make it easier for you to discover and contribute to new articles.

More rewards for contributing

One of the things that I love most is hearing stories of experts who unlocked new business opportunities, new hires, or new clients because of the insights that they shared in collaborative articles. To take this to the next level, we’re now increasing the visibility that your contributions and badges get:

• Improved Top Community Voice badging: If you’re one of the most noteworthy contributors in a skill, your badge for that skill now shows up not only on your profile, but also next to your contributions in the article. Badges will only remain active for members who continue to meet our selective criteria and provide noteworthy contributions within a specific skill. 
• More reach in feed: Your contributions now show up to not only people in your network, but also people outside your network who can learn from your expertise. We also completely redesigned the way your contribution is represented in the home feed, making it easier for readers to appreciate and react.
• More reach in search: When members search for specific problems or topics on LinkedIn, we now surface relevant articles that can contain your contributions.
• More reach in notifications: When you contribute, we now send notifications to members who would benefit from your perspectives. This way, your expertise immediately reaches the people who will get the most value from it.  

Overall, I couldn’t be more grateful for all of you who have been a part of this journey with us over the last 6 months. And I’m even more excited for what the future will hold — especially all the feedback and ideas that you’ll share. Whether you’re new to collaborative articles or a frequent contributor already, jump in at linkedin.com/advice, try the new features out, and let me know below what you think!