LinkedIn launches audio events and new creator tools

Over the past year, more than 10 million people have activated LinkedIn’s Creator Mode. The setting, launched last fall, gives users access to content creation and live streaming tools including LinkedIn Live and newsletters. Today, LinkedIn expands its creator tool offerings by debuting audio events and profile enhancements, pivoting the professional networking platform further into the creator economy.

Emerging from six months of beta-testing, LinkedIn’s audio events gives users the ability to schedule and host discussions, interviews, and other conversations—not dissimilar to apps and tools such as Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Later this month, users will also be able to add a hyperlink to the tops of their profiles, create a shareable follow link for promotional use on other platforms, automatically gain followers from incoming connection requests, and experience enhanced discovery via LinkedIn homepage feeds and via search.

“Since first launching Creator Mode last March, we’ve been excited to see the rapid adoption of our suite of creator tools—everything from newsletters to audio events to enhanced analytics,” Keren Baruch, product lead for creator strategy at LinkedIn, tells Fast Company. “What’s most exciting to watch is how creators are leveraging the different content tools to tell their stories in their own unique ways to spark member engagement.”

In line with the global creator economy surge—link-in-profile company Linktree estimates there are 200 million monetized digital content creators worldwide—LinkedIn reports its users increasingly self-identify as content-makers.

In December 2021, more than 144,000 LinkedIn members included the word “creator” in their job titles—representing a 48 percent increase from pre-pandemic 2019. The job market has responded in kind—in the first four months of 2022, LinkedIn has seen more than 65,000 job listings with the word “creator” in the title, three times the number of creator job posts over the same period in 2021.

As for demographics, since 2015, women creators have grown 300 percent on LinkedIn—a statistic driven by the growth in Gen Z women creators, which LinkedIn reports has grown more than 1,000 percent in the past seven years.