LinkedIn
— a social network for the working world with 350 million users — has
been taking several steps to build up its profile with educational
institutions and specifically students that are making their way from
the classroom into the workplace. Today comes the latest chapter in that
strategy: LinkedIn’s self-service widget
— where people can add qualifications to their LinkedIn profiles
without actually visiting LinkedIn — will now appear on websites for
colleges and universities.
The institutions that have initially signed up for the
program are Arizona State University; Kaplan University; University of
California, San Diego; Villanova University; George Washington
University; Full Sail University; UK’s University of Manchester; UK’s
University of Cambridge; Universitas Indonesia; the UK’s Open
University; Algonquin College; Keio University; and the University of
Melbourne — 13 in all.
This is an extension of a program that was first launched last year
with online learning sites like Lynda.com, Coursera and Microsoft. And
it comes on the heels of the company making several other moves to cater
to younger users. That has included opening special profile pages for higher-education institutions, lowering the minimum age for LinkedIn accounts to 13+, and giving those younger users a search tool to research and find schools to apply to and attend.
The effort seems to be working: LinkedIn tells me that
there are now 40 million college students and recent graduates using its
platform and that it is one of its fastest-growing demographics.
The new functionality getting announced today will
allow colleges and universities to add a button to their sites and in
emails that will let their students present and past add more
credentials to their LinkedIn profiles, specifically in the education
section.
The benefits of this new development work in three ways.
First, on the part of the user, LinkedIn claims that addition
educational credentials to your profile increases the views of it
tenfold. In addition to having the credential there for posterity, you
also get an alert sent out to your contacts whenever you update your
profile, so that too gives you more visibility.
On the part of the universities, this will give them one
more contact point with their current students as well as alumni. In the
ongoing struggle for funding for higher education, anything that lets
these schools continue their link with the latter group is a potential
string that ties them in with their alma mater and potentially can be
pulled by the school for future fundraising drives.
Or, as LinkedIn describes it, the widget “is a helpful
service to offer students and a low-effort way to stay connected with
them over the long term.”
Third and possibly most important is LinkedIn itself. The
company continues to look for ways to engage users to continually update
and refresh the content on the site, and to visit it more regularly.
This is one way of doing that.
And at a time when we are seeing sites like Twitter and
Facebook extend their ad and social networks off-site to third-party
properties by way of embedded tweets and comment sections, the
self-service profile widget is one way for LinkedIn to keep its oar in
the waters for a time when it too might like to try to extend its
identity graph further into other services. One potential area that
LinkedIn could develop over time, for example, could be not just acting
as a resume respository for logging qualifications, but a place where
people could go to actually get those qualifications online.
This also helps LinkedIn amass more data about its users,
which is can harness to improve other aspects of its business like
Talent Solutions (recruitment) as well as advertising on the site. It’s
telling that the widget, as with the earlier version, is free for
colleges to implement.