I recently learned about LinkedIn's new Newsletter feature. This feature allows you to publish content to an audience that has opted-in to your newsletter content. When you publish content, instead of just appearing in the LinkedIn Feed (which is very noisy), it sends a LinkedIn notification to subscribers. I imagine that LinkedIn is offering this feature to compete with SubStack, though I doubt there will be a paid option anytime soon.
A few weeks ago, I decided to try out this new LinkedIn feature. LinkedIn doesn't give you many characters to work with when it comes to naming your newsletter. Here is what mine looks like:
It is unclear how newsletter owners are supposed to "promote" their newsletter and get more subscribers. When I first created the newsletter, it looked like a notification went out to my LinkedIn connections and some of them subscribed. Going forward, people who view newsletter posts can click the "Subscribe" button to join the newsletter. Each newsletter post offers a few ways to subscribe.
Here are some of my initial feature requests for this new service:
The actual post publishing feature is the same as writing articles in LinkedIn, which is very basic and time-consuming. You can't easily copy and paste from MS Word or Google Docs. Adding images and links is a very manual process. For this reason, I am currently just posting links to another blog where I can use Wordpress. I think LinkedIn should acquire or partner with a blogging platform and beef up the features here.
Currently, you have to be all-in as a newsletter subscriber since you cannot create multiple newsletters. If you write about different topics, that means that everyone will see every post. It would be interesting if you could have sub-newsletters or allow subscribers to subscribe to tags such that they only get posts that are tagged with items they care about.
I can imagine that people will eventually get tired of post notifications and mute them, which means that posting to the newsletter is not that much different from posting in your feed. It could be interesting to allow users to choose how often they want to be notified about newsletter posts or only be notified for ones that receive a lot of activity...
Those are just a few of my initial "hot takes" on this new LinkedIn feature. If you have tried it, feel free to share your feedback as well.
