These AI-enabled "Collaborative Articles" have been a hit for the app, with millions of users contributing their knowledge and insights to the AI-generated prompts that help give members additional promotion and provide LinkedIn with more content.

Powered by AI, Collaborative Articles are constructed through LinkedIn's system coming up with industry-specific questions and then prompting experts to add their thoughts.
It then posts those contributors, and amplifies their visibility to interested readers, not to mention the added incentive of receiving a Community Top Voice badge in a core skill area, as an outcome of your Collaborative Article contributions.

So on balance, it makes sense why LinkedIn users would want to add their insight to these prompts, and indeed, Collaborative Articles have seen a 4x increase in weekly member contributions quarter-over-quarter, with, cumulatively, over 10 million contributions in the past year.

And today, LinkedIn has outlined the next steps to evolve the option.

First, LinkedIn says they are refining the structure of Collaborative Article prompts to get more specific answers.

From LinkedIn:

"One recent example has been writing articles that begin with a scenario you could potentially find yourself in at work then frame the problem statement / question based on that. Example: "You're a new supervisor. How do you earn the respect of your team?

But there's more. The site has also introduced the "unhelpful" button, enabling readers to alert LinkedIn's team regarding not-so-great contributions. The feature is still in early testing.

LinkedIn is also working to enhance its Collaborative Article algorithms to ensure the right experts are being prompted to contribute and further extending the reach of Collaborative Article contributions within contributor feeds.

"We've improved how we surface contributions in members' news feeds and notifications, so the most relevant contributions are surfaced to members for their careers-and have seen a 316 percent weekly increase in members reacting to contributions since September."

Maybe a more relevant question about the format. Sure, LinkedIn is capturing lots of fervour to be contributors to Collaborative Articles., to showcase one's expertise, and get that LinkedIn badge of being an "Expert" after adding one's views. But are people actually reading these AI prompted posts?

Apparently, they are, as LinkedIn reports that since September, weekly readership of Collaborative Articles has risen by more than 270 percent.

So in actuality, it's a win-win for the platform, which gains more members to contribute their thoughts, and then more readers will be engaging with the content.

Generally speaking, it may be the best usage of generative AI yet in a social media application.

LinkedIn also expands its feature Collaborative Articles now into more languages, including German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and French.

Lastly, LinkedIn will also add a Collaborative Article filter in search to help users find more relevant insights, and articles to contribute to.
It still feels like an odd format to me, in prompting LinkedIn members to contribute their thoughts based on a bot simulated query. But evidently, it works, and LinkedIn's now looking for ways that it can double down on the format, and maximize engagement and activity.

And if people are reading-and it may well be a huge winner for the app-LinkedIn is shaping up to be a highly competitive platform.