LinkedIn new mobile app increasing referral traffic to blogs

I shared earlier this week that third party publishers, including bloggers, are seeing a big jump in referral traffic from LinkedIn.

By sharing their posts in status updates, as opposed to publishing on LinkedIn, third party publishers are getting their posts seen in LinkedIn’s content curator, Pulse, and in LinkedIn users’ feeds.

The Business Insider’s Laurie Beaver and Margaret Boland believe the jump in referral traffic to publishers is coming from LinkedIn’s mobile app redesign.

LinkedIn’s share of referral traffic to publishers has skyrocketed after it redesigned its mobile app in December, according to Parsely data shared with BI Intelligence. The data, which tracks traffic sources for nearly 400 digital publishers including Conde Nast, Reuters, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, reveals that LinkedIn jumped from 0.06% of total referral traffic at the end of November 2015 — right before the rollout of the mobile app redesign — to nearly 0.20% at the beginning of January.

While LinkedIn’s share of publishers’ referral traffic still pales in comparison to other social sources — Facebook commands 40% of total referral traffic, according to Parsely — its increase signals that the platform’s efforts to become a distribution channel for publishers are paying off, at least slowly.

Though I think LinkedIn algorithms are loosening the reigns as far as surfacing content from its contributor network (content published on LinkedIn publishing platform) in preference to content shared from third party sites,  I agree with Beaver and Boland that the mobile app is making a difference.

One, the app provides users a much nicer interface from which to consume content. Seeing a snippet of a post or article, users can seamlessly and easily the read content on the third party site right in the LinkedIn user interface.

Two, the app makes it easy to share content. Users are frequently sharing my content that I have already shared in LinkiedIn with others in their LinkedIn. The more shares, the more referral traffic.

And three, networking is increasing big time with the new app. People are liking my content, sharing my content and commenting on my content. This gives me the opportunity to engage them and for them to engage each other — both via the content and LinkedIn messenger. With business development being the heart of LinkedIn, we’re all using the app more and consuming more content as well.

Big message for bloggers here. If your blogs are not responsive for optimal mobile viewing, you are nuts. Blog posts on LinkedIn are being displayed in your blog interface right in LinkedIn’s app. LinkedIn is not going to clean up your garbage of non-mobile development so that LinkedIn users can read your content.

Not only do you look lame and leaking innovation with non-mobile, you’re wasting people’s time. It takes time to publish blog posts. Why do you want to make them difficult to read? Why do you want to make sure others do no not share your posts at LinkedIn?

Bottom line, LinkedIn is the friend of blog publishers – for now.

Image courtesy of Flickr by David Alcalde