1 year, 10 million contributions: Unlocking the world’s expertise through collaborative articles

It’s crazy to think, but it’s been a whole year since we launched collaborative articles — our knowledge artifacts that are initially crafted through the power of AI, but brought to life by the real-life experiences of our members. Back in October, I shared that we had reached 1 million contributions from member experts in the first 6 months since launch. That number has only accelerated: today, there are over 10 million contributions in our collaborative articles, with weekly readership having increased over 270% since September. What does this tell us? 

First: There’s a ton of expertise that exists on LinkedIn, and real, meaningful interest in people learning from that expertise. And second: There are endless opportunities for us to take collaborative articles to the next level, to help us realize our vision of bringing the world’s best perspectives on every professional topic into one place.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ve been investing in to make that happen: 

Upleveling the most original, insightful contributions

I was scrolling through my feed the other week, and came across a great collaborative article on how mentors can help you navigate your career path — one of my favorite contributions was from Melinda French Gates, who shared a personal story about her experience with mentorship at Microsoft. Soon after, Arianna Huffington chimed in about how her mother has been her best mentor.

Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, a recent frequent contributor, said it best: “The best ideas always come from collaboration. LinkedIn's collaborative articles open the stage for everyone to share their best insights, and the result is one big story that's far more impactful than any one individual thought."

To make it easier for the world’s best experts to contribute to the right articles, and for members to find the most original, helpful, and insightful contributions from the 10M+ we now have, here are a couple new enhancements we’re making:

• Elevating quality: To make it easier for contributors to share their highest quality “been there, done that” stories, we’ve evolved the way we ask questions — one recent example has been writing articles that start with a situation you might find yourself in at work, then framing a problem statement / question based on that. Here’s one example: “You're a new supervisor. How do you earn the respect of your team?”. Additionally, we’ve started introducing a new unhelpful button that members can find below any contribution inside an article, to notify our team of contributions that may not be helpful — stay tuned for more coming here.

• Matching contributors with the right articles: We’ve heard your feedback! To make it easier for contributors to find the articles where they can share their best insights and stories, we’re repeatedly iterating and improving our matching algorithms. You can read more about how our matching algorithms work here.

Sparking deeper conversations

As our articles become richer with more contributions, we want to make it easier to keep the conversation going. Here are a couple things we’ve started to roll out to enable that:

• New mobile experience: We’ve reimagined the mobile collaborative articles experience to put our member contributions front and center — mirroring the desktop redesign we launched a few months ago. As you scroll through a collaborative article on mobile, you'll see a new window slide up from the bottom, displaying the available expert contributions, as well as the ability to add a contribution yourself.

• Engage further with other contributions: We’ve improved how we distribute contributions in members’ feeds and notifications, showing members the most relevant ones for their careers — and have seen a 316% weekly increase in members reacting to contributions since September. As a result, we’re now hearing from contributors that their best collaborative article contributions are getting similar reach to their original posts. Stay tuned for even more ways to engage with contributions, like the ability to reply to a contribution, coming soon.

• International language expansion: Now, members across a variety of languages — including German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and French — can collaborate on the same articles. When a contribution is in a language other than the one you’re using LinkedIn in, you’re able to easily see that contribution translated to your default language — making it easier than ever to share and gain knowledge without language as a barrier.

Making it easier to find articles and follow experts

Since September, we've seen a nearly 3X increase in members reading collaborative articles weekly. To make it even easier for members to find and explore the articles and contributors they’re interested in, we’ve added some new features:

• Collaborative articles filter in Search: We’re excited to begin rolling out a way for you to now search for the exact collaborative articles that pertain to your interests, just as you would search for any other type of post on LinkedIn. Check back soon for more details on how you can take full advantage of this!

• Follow contributors and featured experts: Since adding the ability to follow contributors in a collaborative article in September, we’ve seen a 289% weekly increase in members following contributors via collaborative articles. For LinkedIn members, this allows you to stay up-to-date with experts whose insights you value. And for contributors, it helps you grow your network and LinkedIn communities, centered around topics that you’re passionate about discussing.

One year in, and this is just the start of how collaborative articles will allow knowledge sharing to thrive on LinkedIn. We look forward to continuing to help our members share and find knowledge as they grow in their careers. Visit www.linkedin.com/advice to check out an article and dive into these new features!