LinkedIn adds a range of reactions to spur more engagement in conversations

Sometimes a “like” in social media doesn’t give the full picture, or you’re just not inspired enough to write a fuller response. Today LinkedIn addressed that issue on its own platform, with the introduction of four new reactions people can use in response to posts in their timelines. In addition to “like”, you can now react in four other ways to posts with icons that indicate “celebrate,” “love,” “insightful” and “curious.”

The reactions are rolling out globally to the company’s nearly 600 million users starting today to both the desktop and mobile apps.

LinkedIn’s rollout comes in the wake of similar moves on other social platforms, perhaps most noticeably on Facebook, which launched an expanded set of reaction buttons more than three years ago. LinkedIn has never been one for jumping quickly to new trends, but this nevertheless shows that it’s listening and understands that it has to provide more to users to make its platform more dynamic and to help spur more engagement (and in turn more people posting to the platform).

LinkedIn product manager Cissy Chen notes that the company based its selection of reactions on the kinds of conversations that people are already having on LinkedIn (and probably the kinds of conversations that LinkedIn would like to continue to encourage), and also what people were writing most commonly when providing 1-2 word terse responses.

Typically, posts range from people announcing new professional roles, or milestones, or sharing learnings from somewhere else — hence the leaning to two reactions giving encouragement, and two more contemplative reactions.

LinkedIn’s wider goals in providing tools like this are to continue to get more users engaged on its platform. In the years since Microsoft acquired the company, I’d argue that some of the iterations the company has made to different aspects of its service have slowed down, which makes it more open to other companies coming in and creating more useful and modern replacements.

On the other hand, platforms like Facebook have been quick to add ever more features and functionality — its own efforts in recruitment services and mentoring being direct competitors to LinkedIn’s social tools for the working world — and so for LinkedIn to continue to keep people around, and to attract new users looking for alternatives, even incremental additions like this one make a difference.