Linked In’s New News Is New News

On Friday morning, social media site Linked In announced a couple of new products that they hope will enhance their viability in the very crowded social media webspace.

One of the keys to a successful social media website is that you need to keep your members coming back. You basically need to get your members to become addicted to your site, so that you will keep on coming back to see what’s happening. Both FaceBook and Twitter seem to have achieved that in spades, and now LinkedIn are adding some extra reasons that they hope will help you to become more addicted to their products too.

The first of these products, LinkedIn Signal, provides a means of applying filters to the content provided within LinkedIn. Items such as status updates can now be filtered, so that you can improve the signal to noise ratio, and thus make your experience more meaningful.

LinkedIn Today is an offering whereby popular news stories and content are able to be identified and relayed into your profile, without you having to actually go looking for it.

Think of it as if LinkedIn is, in FaceBook terms, looking at which stories are being read by those with similar interest streams to yours, and it’s then favouriting (what a horrible word that is) or recommending them to you.

Or, perhaps, like those ads on tv where you see people streaming out of a movie or show, and they’re telling you how much they liked it, and that you should go and see it too. At least within LinkedIn, you know that you share at least some common profile characteristics with those others who have read the same story.

And of course, having read a particular story is in no way a statement that you felt that the story has any merit and should therefore be recommended.

But the facility is there. Will it make LinkedIn more compelling? Only time will tell.