LinkedIn’s launched a tool that prods employees to share company content

LinkedIn has been betting big on content over the past year, and its latest product underlines the professional social network’s direction.

Elevate is a new tool for companies to curate content and push it to their employees to share on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Available for desktop, iOS and Android, the app lets businesses beam relevant content employees to share with their networks to help increase engagement and connections for their companies. The idea is that content shared by employees feels more authentic than when it comes from companies.

Elevate combines algorithmic content recommendations from the company’s Pulse news app and Newsle, the news alerts startup it acquired last year, with human curation. It measures audience activity to suggest the best times to share posts for maximum visibility.

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LinkedIn Elevate combines algorithmic recommendations from LinkedIn Pulse and Newsle and human curation to line up content, and gauges audience activity to suggest the best times for employees to share posts for maximum visibility.

The app also offers analytics for both companies and employees, so they can see how many likes, comments and reshares their content has received, as well as job views and company page followers.

Just because the app makes it easy for companies to recommend content to employees doesn’t mean it’ll be a great fit for every organization.

Initiatives like this require a certain kind of corporate culture, and have to be tested carefully to see if they’ll actually stick. If employees aren’t on board, the whole ‘authenticity’ ploy goes right out of the window.

There’s also the risk of impinging on employees’ freedom to express themselves. The app makes it much easier to recommend content from on high, demand staff share it, and tie social activity to performance reviews.

However, used correctly, Elevate could definitely help companies get a boost in selling and hiring. LinkedIn claims that when members share six pieces of content, on average, they receive six profile views and make two new connections, while their employer sees six job views, three company page views, and one company page follower.

LinkedIn Elevate is currently available only by invitation, and will open to the public by Q3.

➤ LinkedIn Elevate

Read next: What we found when we analyzed the top 1,000 posts on LinkedIn