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LinkedIn Builds Its Education Business With New Slideshow Editing, Sharing Tool

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LinkedIn has taken another step toward its goal of becoming the primary link between professionals and the knowledge they need for their careers.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn introduced a new tool for editing and sharing slides from its SlideShare platform, a collection of about 18 million professionally-related slideshows and videos. The tool, called “Clipping,” is free and lets users more easily organize slides for themselves, for example, when doing research, and makes it simpler to share individual slides or whole decks through LinkedIn, social media sites or email. “Influencers” on LinkedIn can also use the tool to highlight their most popular or shareable slides, which can help build their identity as an expert. To improve credibility on the platform, the Mountain View, Calif.-based professional network said it has more deeply integrated SlideShare content with users’ LinkedIn profiles.

More than 80% of traffic to SlideShare currently comes from search, and Clipping should make it easier to discover slides through other sources, according to LinkedIn’s Caroline Gaffney, who leads SlideShare’s product team. Slideshare has about 70 million monthly active users, and content on the platform has nearly doubled since 2013. LinkedIn also said it has changed SlideShare’s name to LinkedIn SlideShare.

“If you think about the currency of knowledge across the visual content on SlideShare, the individual slides are the currency,” Gaffney told FORBES. “The ability to break that apart and share individual slides unlocks that knowledge and makes it more powerful to share.”

“We’re really trying to tackle the ability for you to find the best content most easily and identify authors by their LinkedIn profiles to see if they really are credible about the topic,” Gaffney added.

Since LinkedIn acquired Slideshare in 2012, the professional network has actively expanded the ways users can access professional knowledge through its network. Earlier this year, LinkedIn acquired video tutorial library Lynda.com for $1.5 billion, its largest acquisition to date. The purchase added 6,800 courses to the network and is expected to generate about $90 million in sales in 2015. LinkedIn doesn’t want to be a place users visit solely to find jobs, and its efforts around education make this clear.

Clipping helps fill a gap in LinkedIn’s educational offerings by serving users who want quick bites of information or an overview before deciding if they want to invest more time or resources to learn about the topic, Gaffney said. If they choose to seek more information, Clipping leads them to longer presentations on SlideShare, and SlideShare directs users to more in-depth courses on Lynda.com, Gaffney said. The most popular topics on SlideShare tend to be related to technology, such as programming languages, social media marketing or how to build an app on Apple iOS, Gaffney said. The second-most popular category is general business and leadership skills, such as public speaking.

LinkedIn decided to create Clipping after realizing how much manual effort users were making to edit SlideShare presentations offline before sharing slides online with colleagues or professional contacts. The tool was also inspired by observing how users engage with photo-sharing platforms, Gaffney said. LinkedIn plans to continue to create new features to make it easier for users to organize slides, find SlideShare content and build their professional brands by creating slides, the company said. Gaffney said LinkedIn is building the ability to annotate slides, and could make it possible for users to also clip individual LinkedIn profiles or posts from publishers and influencers.

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