LinkedIn announces Elevate app to help employees share company content

LinkedIn is announcing today a new app called Elevate. It’s designed to help people share high-quality content from the companies they work for — and show how that content leads to website traffic, sales leads, and even hires.

Elevate provides content that employees can share on Twitter and LinkedIn. It could help companies appear more relatable and engaging than they would on their own, because employees will be doing the sharing.

“Our research shows that only 2 percent of employees share content their company has shared on LinkedIn,” LinkedIn product manager Will Sun wrote in a blog post about the new app. “Yet they drive tremendous value. They’re responsible for about 20 percent of the overall engagement — clicks, likes, comments, and shares — that content receives. That’s not surprising given employees have 10 times more connections than their company has followers, and people tend to be considered more authentic than companies.”

Now LinkedIn has a product companies can tap to take advantage of their employees’ organic connections.

This is the sort of product that only a company like LinkedIn — with its hundreds of millions of business users, and its status as a virtual place that businesspeople constantly check — could pull off. News about Elevate follows launches of standalone LinkedIn apps Connected and Job Search, among others.

Elevate — with desktop, iOS, and Android apps — will be available for all to use in the third quarter of this year. For now, it’s available on a company-by-company basis by invitation only.

The service shares content at the optimal time. It draws on technology from LinkedIn’s Pulse news app and Newsle, a news notification service that LinkedIn acquired last year. But Elevate also draws on human curation to ensure that people can always find content tailored for them in the app, Sun wrote.

Analytics tools for Elevate will show employees how people engage with the content they share. On the flip side, Elevate will show participating employers how the content sharing translates into job views, company page followers, and leads and sales, Sun wrote.

Find more information on the app here.