Linkedin Collective Articles as an Effective Way to Distribute Expert-Class Content
The article content
Not long ago, the LinkedIn social network launched an innovative project called collective articles, but over the past time, the results of this decision have exceeded even the boldest expectations. In about one year of its existence, the number of such pages has already exceeded 10 million. And these are not empty publications. This is truly expert-level material containing a lot of useful information for the consumer market. Users very quickly appreciated the collective articles, which is confirmed by statistics. In particular, from September last year to today, the regular audience of this type of publication has grown more than 5 times.
At the same time, many experts agree that this trend of rapid growth will continue for quite a long time. This means that anyone working in the SEO and SMM promotion segment can take as a basis a number of ideas laid down in collective articles. Looking ahead, we will note a little ahead that such material involves the use of artificial intelligence technology and the expertise of real people with professional knowledge and skills in the relevant market segment.
As part of today's review, we will dwell in more detail on what collective articles are, where they can be viewed and what methods of interaction with such content are currently provided for the target audience. We will tell you why this technology works and shows impressive results in practice, as well as how the LinkedIn platform managed to create such a huge number of expert-class pages. We will tell you what updates have occurred in the platform's algorithms recently, which will allow you to initially prepare content that will prove to be most effective in practice. Let's pay attention to how to organize work with a social platform without any risks and restrictions, as well as to ensure full access to it from different countries and regions of the world.
What are collective articles
Launching the project “Collective Articles”, the social network Linkedin pursued one key goal - to collect in one publication large-scale collective knowledge present in people who are part of thematic communities. Thanks to this, ordinary users got the opportunity to delve deeper into a particular area, study the opinions of professionals and, based on the information received, form their own competent opinion in a particular niche. There are many, many areas in which the platform launched collective articles, but still, given the very specifics of Linkedin, most of them relate to professional topics. Alternatively, the most popular communities dedicated to finding promising business areas, getting a promotion, taking a business to a new level and scaling it.
It turns out that collective articles combine thematic knowledge, supplemented with important and relevant information today, personal opinions and arguments of users of the site who have sufficiently deep knowledge in a particular niche. Initially, this material is created by a team of editors of the site. A kind of communication and discussions are launched using modern neural networks. But still, despite the fact that artificial intelligence is developing very quickly today, all the knowledge that it receives in the course of machine learning cannot yet be called expert. And one of the most basic problems when working with neural networks is weak relevance. Knowledge obtained by artificial intelligence in the course of machine learning may be outdated at the time of preparation of the material, because the modern market is developing very quickly, and simultaneously in many directions.
To eliminate this problem, the editors of the social network Linkedin came up with collective articles. That is, they initially choose a topic that would be interesting to the user audience. Then, using neural networks, they form the basic material, and only then invite experts in the relevant niche to comment on it. It turns out that absolutely every member of the community can contribute to the preparation of such material, express their own ideas, give examples, share their experience, confirm their opinion with various evidence. As a result, it is possible to obtain material containing truly relevant, expert information that in practice will be useful to a wide segment of the consumer market.
How can an ordinary user access such material?
How can I view collective articles?
We note right away that absolutely every user of the social network Linkedin and even a person who is not registered on the site can get access to collective articles. To do this, you just need to go to the "Articles" tab. Immediately after that, you will see a full list of collective articles. There are a lot of them here. For greater convenience in finding the right material, we recommend paying attention to the vertical menu on the right side, where individual categories are listed:
- marketing;
- public administration;
- healthcare;
- engineering;
- environmental sustainability;
- telecommunications;
- content management;
- organic search;
- user interface development;
- web content;
- leisure industry;
- sales.
We will not provide a list further, but there are quite a lot of topics. Moreover, not all of them are immediately displayed in this menu. Therefore, if you have not found your section, click on the "View all topics" button. After that, a full list will open in front of you, from which you can select the section that is relevant to you at the moment.
Also, using your LinkedIn feed, notification tools and messages, you can receive notifications from the site about the release of new material in your topic or about additions to the materials that you are tracking. Thanks to this, you will always be aware of the latest changes and relevant material.
Additionally, there is also the ability to search by key queries. In this case, you will need to directly enter a phrase related to professional skills or a specific thematic question in the search bar. After that, the site itself will redirect you to the corresponding page in the section of collective articles or skills.
Another opportunity to access such publications of the site is is to use a regular search engine outside the Linkedin social network. That is, through your browser you enter the query you need and in the search results you find materials directly from the platform.
Along with directly studying the material, users will also be able to interact with collective articles, and in several ways.
Features of interaction with LinkedIn collective articles
When launching collective articles, the developers of the LinkedIn platform sought to provide subscribers with the most informative, useful expert-level material. You, as an ordinary user of the platform, can not only read these publications, but also express your own opinion about them. In particular: interaction with LinkedIn collective articles can be carried out in the following ways:
- share the material with your friends, acquaintances, post reactions to publications, save the article for yourself as any other publication in the feed;
- if you liked the material, you found it useful for yourself, then you can click on the “Like” mark (icon with the image of a clenched fist with a thumb up) or put any other reaction;
- if the publication in your opinion is not informative, if it is not related to the topic and is rather random, then you, as a user of the social network, have every right to mark it as useless (this is purely your mark, and it will not be visible to other participants, but you will no longer dwell on this material, since it does not carry any value for you personally);
- at the very end of the article, you can evaluate not only the essence of the presented, but also the general quality of the article, express your own opinion on the design, content, thereby helping the LinkedIn social network to improve, improve work with content;
- if you noticed that any of the materials violates the "Policy for the community of specialists", which is currently in effect on the site, then you can complain to the administration both about the contribution of an individual and about the entire article.
Now let's take a closer look at how you can contribute to collective articles.
Features of making your own contribution to collective articles
By and large, anyone with sufficient knowledge in one area or another can become an expert who can express their own opinion on a particular material published on LinkedIn pages. The platform, based on its own algorithms, identifies participants who, in its opinion, have expert skills in a specific topic. Here, their work experience, the skills they possess, and the interactions they previously carried out on the platform are analyzed.
Such specialists must necessarily earn a high level of trust from the social network. In particular, they must comply with the Policy for the community of specialists and the User Agreements that are relevant for this platform at the current time. At the same time, the contribution that each person makes to the collective article must be relevant, unique and at the same time complement the existing material. That is, there should be no repetitions, opinions, so to speak, obtained from other sources.
In order for the platform to consider your candidacy for the role of an expert, you need to show some interaction with the material. Alternatively, you can leave your reaction to it or mark it as a “Like”. If your candidacy is selected, you will receive a corresponding invitation to contribute to the material. Now the “Express your opinion” button will become active. You click on it, after which a new window opens, where you can write your content. If other members of the social network consider you an expert in a certain niche, the social network will award your profile with a special emblem of the TOP expert of the community.
Alternatively, this could be a TOP expert in management, a TOP expert in career growth. Users whose publications most often received “Like” marks or other positive reactions will be able to earn such a badge. That is, it is necessary that your material is informative, useful, accurately relates to the relevant topic, and also that users appreciate it. That is, these should not be empty publications, but content that can complement collective articles, increase their expertise.
So what is the secret of collective articles?
Many have already been able to see for themselves that collective articles really work in practice. The very idea of their launch was that people who turn to the Internet with a particular question want to get a really useful and competent answer. And this is only possible if it is provided by a specialist who has a deep understanding of a particular topic. It probably goes without saying that you should not ask a pastry chef questions like “how to install Windows on a new computer.” Leave that to the IT guys. In turn, the IT guy is unlikely to tell you which mousse will best complement a chocolate cake.
What is published on the Internet today can hardly be called expert material. Many topics are constantly being rewritten, but not always expanded in terms of current innovations. In addition, very often, in order to make the material unique, changes are made to the publications that have nothing to do with reality. This means that if you find an answer to your request on the Internet, even on sites located at the top of the search results, you can’t be sure that the information here is truly truthful and relevant. And it’s one thing if you understand the subject at least a little and can identify inaccuracies, and quite another if you are just trying to understand a particular issue. As a result, you can receive completely unreliable information. And who knows what consequences such training will have for you.
That is, how can you, a person who is not an expert in a particular niche, know that a particular publication deserves attention and, moreover, trust? By and large, no way. Yes, you can study a large number of different publications, identify similar ones in them, and accept this as the truth. But such an approach will require a lot of time and deep immersion in the materials, most of which, unfortunately, will be completely useless.
Collective articles are designed to eliminate such a problem and help ordinary Internet users get expert material in a particular niche. This is the secret of their success. That is, you are knowingly getting access to material written by specialists in a particular topic. Moreover, such pages are ranked in search engines, which ultimately benefits not only users, but also the expert himself. This is an incentive to continue working with the material and writing even more useful content.
How did Linkedin manage to create over ten million pages of expert-class content?
We have already talked about the algorithms used by the Linkedin social network to select from the general mass of its subscribers those people who have deep professional knowledge in a particular area. Then the representatives of the platform ask the selected people to prepare a short material on a given topic. But the topics themselves are generated by neural networks. In particular, Linkedin has developed its own tool that works on the basis of artificial intelligence in strict accordance with the specifics of its work.
Next, the Skills Graph of the social platform is used, with the help of which topics are compared with selected experts. In this case, a tool called "Structured Skills" is used. It works on a machine learning model and performs natural language processing in order to determine related skills. That is, in addition to the topics that community members themselves have highlighted in their profiles, artificial intelligence also selects related areas. To do this, it studies the description of vacancies left on the platforms, personal profiles of users, as well as other materials that are published on the platform.
It works something like this:
- Let's say that a Linkedin user writes in his profile that he is well versed in artificial intelligence.
- The "Structured Skills" tool assumes that this same person will be well versed in areas such as deep and machine learning.
- The system automatically sends a message to this user with a request to prepare material on these topics.
It all sounds simple enough, but in order to identify such an expert, machine learning and artificial intelligence, which are at the service of LinkedIn, have to comb through huge arrays of data, find both the user skills themselves and the relationship between them. Different types of texts are analyzed, the degree of their reliability is checked. As a result, it is possible to ensure not only wide coverage, but also the highest possible accuracy of matching the professional skills of a particular user.
That is, through the collaboration of artificial intelligence technology and the professional knowledge of a real person, expert-class material is created that carries significant benefits for other users of the platform and not only. It is thanks to this that Linkedin managed to create a huge number of collective articles in a large number of topics in a fairly short period of time. Do not forget that we are talking about a platform that a priori brings together specialists in a particular field.
The latest improvements in the tool “Collective Articles”
By and large, the idea that became the basis of the LinkedIn platform project “Collective Articles” can be called brilliant. Here, the developers managed to achieve the incredible: get a huge number of pages of expert-class content on an unrealistic number of topics. And the success of this idea can be confirmed by the fact that every day more and more often in organic impressions search engines you can see pages of this social network.
Moreover, LinkedIn did not stop there. The platform continues to successfully develop and improve its project “Collective Articles”, expanding it, adding new functionality designed to further improve the quality of pages. In particular, we are talking about such innovations as:
- Innovative ways of asking questions. The point is that the LinkedIn neural network not only gives selected experts topics for writing essays, but also offers them a plan of similar publications containing the most relevant issues in this segment.
- Availability of advanced topic selection algorithms. Quite recently, the platform has made improvements to the tool that selects experts in a particular area. When performing this work, real user reviews were taken into account regarding the quality of expert and topic selection.
- Availability of the “Useless information” button. We have already said above that if you, as a LinkedIn user, study a particular article and consider that it does not contain any useful information for you, you can make a corresponding note for yourself and never return to this material again. But in the latest update, the developers created the “Useless information” button. If you click on it, the Linkedin algorithm will see that the addition of a particular expert did not add any benefit to the material. In turn, this will cause a more detailed study and, if the uselessness is proven, such material will simply be deleted.
Additional updates to the content display algorithms on Linkedin
Collective articles from Linkedin are just one of the latest updates that have appeared on the platform recently. But despite its scale, it is far from the only one. We would also like to draw special attention to other updates that have occurred on the platform in relation to the content display algorithms. Having this information, you will be able to make adjustments to your own publications and make them such that the social network will automatically promote them, offering them for study to users. SEO specialists will also find this knowledge useful. In particular, we are talking about such innovations as:
- A focus on publications that are useful to visitors. Linkedin developers reported that the platform's algorithm now works in such a way as to provide users with the most interesting and relevant topics in terms of professional skills. That is, the platform responds to reactions left by other people, their comments. Publications that will cause more responses from users will automatically appear in the feeds of other users in related areas of their professional activity. The focus will also be on those people and pages that you are already subscribed to. Those where you have already personally been able to see the professionalism of the content creators.
- The presence of a search by topic and query filters. Now the platform uses so-called Events, Newsletters, Groups and other filters. Thanks to this, you, as a user, when searching for a particular topic, will receive a selection from Linkedin, including publications from experts in their niche. That is, you will be offered materials that will help you better understand a particular area. You can also use a filter to narrow the search as much as possible. Alternatively, you can initially specify the topic itself in the search bar, and then, using filters, select those materials from this area that are closest to you and then study them in as much detail as possible, discarding the unnecessary.
- Recommended publications. When selecting them, the system uses the most relevant information. Once you go to your feed, you will see a selection of offers, including those publications that are currently considered the most popular and in demand in the niche in which you work. Thanks to this, the need for a long search for the most suitable material is eliminated. Again, the professionalism and expertise of such materials is determined by the system based on the reactions left by other users.
- The presence of the X button. This is one of the last tools that allows you to hide a topic or a particular publication that is not interesting to you. If you use it, the social network will no longer offer you materials related to this category in the recommended selection. That is, you can literally exclude everything that is not related to your professional activities and, in principle, will not interest you with one click. You just need to click the X button next to the publication that you are not interested in and thereby hide it from your feed. But to understand what materials will be most interesting to you, Linkedin has added a small survey under each publication in the feed. You will need to simply click on the button indicating whether this publication was useful or valuable. In addition to the fact that you can click on one of the buttons "Yes" or "No", you can also additionally indicate the reason why you highly rated this article or, on the contrary, it was not interesting to you.
All this allows us to confidently say that the Linkedin social network continues to work to offer its subscribers the most relevant, meaningful expert-class materials. Those that will not cause doubts among people who are well versed in a particular area and will provide significant assistance to users who are just trying to understand a certain issue.
Let's sum it up
Of all the innovations that have appeared today in the LinkedIn social network, many specialists have embraced collective articles with great enthusiasm. Moreover, they consider them to be one of the best strategic projects for creating expert content. This is largely due to the combination of knowledge obtained by artificial intelligence during machine learning and the baggage that real people have working in the relevant niche.
This is what made it possible to obtain materials that are highly rated by users, those that can be trusted. Moreover, thanks to interaction with its subscribers, the social network additionally filters materials, identifying those that do not meet their needs. And the most remarkable thing is that such publications are now widely present in search engine results. That is, you do not have to be a Linkedin user to get access to such publications.
But what you absolutely must have is the ability to log in directly to this social network. And not every country in the world has it. That is, the banal lack of access to the site automatically closes expert content for you. You can bypass such restrictions in a fairly simple way, in particular, by connecting mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service to work. Follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy to get a more detailed look at what this tool is, choose the most suitable tariffs and geolocation for yourself.
After connecting mobile proxies to Linkedin, you will create a new digital identity for yourself. You will be able to choose the geolocation from which you can connect to the social network without restrictions. That is, by doing this you will bypass regional blocking and will be able to work with the site without any obstacles. If necessary, you can easily change your own IP address by setting up automatic change or changing the address each time forcibly using the link from your personal account. High functionality of these mobile proxies is also ensured by simultaneous connection of protocols to parallel ports, a huge number of IP addresses and GEO. You are also guaranteed reliable protection from any unauthorized access, hacker attacks, maintaining confidentiality when working not only with Linkedin, but also with other Internet sites, services in general.
If you have any additional questions, we suggest you visit the FAQ section or seek advice from technical support specialists who work around the clock, including weekends and holidays.