LinkedIn Wants To Show You Who's Reading Your Posts -- And Who's Not

LinkedIn wants you writing more, but on LinkedIn. The professional social network announced a new analytics tool that will allow LinkedIn users who publish stories directly to the site to track their traffic and see who is viewing and sharing the content.

In a post Wednesday on the LinkedIn blog senior product manager Angela Yang described LinkedIn as the “place you want to be to share your expertise and to discuss issues that matter to you with other like-minded professionals.” In 2012, LinkedIn launched its first content platform for users called LinkedIn Influencer that allowed select business leaders to publish on the site. In 2014, the site opened the ability to post original content to all users.

But before now, LinkedIn users could see what resonated only by reading comments. Now, the company has unveiled analytics that show how many other LinkedIn users are reading the posts and information about them. The data will show percentages of industries, titles and geographic locations from which posts are drawing readers, as well as list profiles of recent readers, similar to LinkedIn’s current “Who’s viewed your profile” service.

Publishers can also track how the readership changes over time. The demographics do not cover every viewer but only logged-in LinkedIn members. These additions are similar to the tools that Facebook provides users in Facebook Insights.

LinkedIn is slowly rolling out the feature so not every user has access to the analytics yet. The analytics will be available in their current state to all LinkedIn users, but this introduction could be another potential revenue stream. Last week after releasing its first-quarter earnings, the company’s stock dropped 25 percent. The company failed to meet revenue expectations and also experienced steady user growth.