LinkedIn gives users the ability to share photos, documents and presentations in their status updates

Less than a month after it introduced multimedia content to users’ profile pages, LinkedIn has rolled out similar functionality today for status updates posted from the homepage.

Users can now upload images, documents, presentations and other file types to any post that they want to share with their LinkedIn network. The idea is to give users a much broader and richer feature set for communicating with the people they know, thereby increasing user engagement and public perception of the service.

“Whether it’s a thought-provoking presentation about the future of big data or it’s a picture of an inspirational quote, or perhaps it’s an infographic showing the top trends impacting your industry, the possibilities are endless for what you can share on LinkedIn to add a richer and more visual component to your professional discussions,” Itamar Orgad, senior product manager at LinkedIn said.

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The feature will be rolling out to all LinkedIn users over the next few weeks, so it might take a little while for the new functionality to show up in your account. To upload new content, simply click the paperclip icon in the top right hand-corner of the text field, before hitting the ‘Add a File’ option towards the bottom of the dialog box.

Only images, documents and presentations can be uploaded locally, however. To attach videos or other rich media content, users will need to manually paste the URL into the share box. It’s a little frustrating, but hopefully wider file type support will come in a future update.

To coincide with the announcement, LinkedIn has also said that it has given 2.9 million Company Page admins the ability to directly upload images and other files. “So you can expect to see richer and more engaging visual content flowing across your LinkedIn experience,” Orgad added.

LinkedIn has been keen to push its redesigned homepage as a real-time social feed similar to Twitter or Facebook. It’s yet to take off in quite the same way, however, with LinkedIn instead finding greater success in its profile pages, Company Pages and private messaging.

Today’s announcement is also notable given that News Corporation recently unveiled its own business-focused social network for The Wall Street Journal, called WSJ Profile, which will be rolling out to its readers in the next couple of weeks.

 Image Credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images