LinkedIn’s looking to make it easier to find relevant newsletters in your niche, by adding a new option that will enable members to view what newsletters another member is subscribed to in the app.
As per LinkedIn:
“We’ve heard from members that newsletters on LinkedIn are a great way to gather new insights and ideas on professional topics that they care about. We’ve also heard that members are looking for better ways to discover even more newsletters that would be relevant to them. To aid in this discovery, we are making newsletter subscriptions visible to others, including on profiles. Starting February 11th, 2023, you’ll be able to see which newsletters members find value in, the same way you can see your shared interests, pages and groups.”
LinkedIn newsletters are part of its Creator Mode option, with users that switch on Creator Mode able to create their own newsletters in the app, which are then shared to subscribers via in-app and email notifications. LinkedIn also added the capacity for Company Pages to create their own newsletters early last year.
Newsletters went through a boom phase in early 2021, with several of the major platforms working to incorporate newsletter elements, in order to lean into the growth of email updates as an alternative form of funding for independent journalism, while also growing personal brands and thought leadership.
Following a raft of publisher closures as a result of the COVID downturn, which saw ad spend dry up, social platforms saw an opportunity to become more critical connectors within the information chain. And while some have seen big success in launching their own publications, many have fallen away, and both Meta and Twitter have pretty much abandoned their own newsletter elements, in favor of other initiatives.
LinkedIn, however, is still working to help creators build more connections via newsletter outreach. The capacity to see which newsletters a user is subscribed to could help in this respect – though it could also lead to a new push on newsletters from brands, as they look to tap into another form of promotion in the app.
I mean, if the content is good, and people subscribe to your newsletter as a result, that may not be a bad thing, but you might also see more companies pushing employees to sign-up to their own updates, for example, in order to boost exposure for their outreach.
But overall, it seems like a relatively minor element. Maybe it makes newsletters a bigger consideration on LinkedIn, it really depends on how up front this info is, and how many people are seeing these listings.
