The traffic LinkedIn drives to publishers has dropped 44 per cent this year

For the first four months of the year, referral traffic to SimpleReach’s 1,000 publisher base declined 44 per cent, according to the firm, which provides industry content performance measurement and distribution. For the first eight months, it declined 30 per cent.

LinkedIn accounted for just 0.2 per cent of news and media sites’ social media traffic in the US in June, according to SimilarWeb, a Web traffic research firm. Globally, the figure was half that — 0.1 per cent.

At the same time, counterintuitively, readers are sharing more content from publishers’ sites to LinkedIn by clicking share buttons on publishers’ sites. The average monthly number of articles shared to LinkedIn has soared from 500,000 to at least 3m in the past 18 months, according to ShareThis, which puts share buttons on publishers’ sites. Still, LinkedIn still represents just 1 per cent of content shared, as Facebook dominates sharing behaviour. And the content that people do share to LinkedIn provides limited benefit to publishers because of how the platform operates.

“Overall engagement/shares of content posted to LinkedIn is actually increasing, which I would guess to mean more people are posting more content to LinkedIn,” said Edward Kim, SimpleReach’s CEO. “But LinkedIn isn’t further promoting that content through their network.”

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Source: Digiday

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