LinkedIn’s New ‘Pulse’ Extends a Helping Hand to Brands

Great news for franchise brands in the news: LinkedIn's news app, Pulse, is getting, well, more of a pulse. The social networking titan announced yesterday that it’s launched a redesigned version of the news feature’s iOS and Android app, adopting a much more personalized approach to which real time news stories are curated to users.

The previous version of Pulse had a more RSS-like model, with a Twitter-like stream of stories from any group, affiliation or industry a user followed. The new and tidier Pulse features bolder images, eye-catching headlines, and most importantly, a collection of aggregated stories based on data from your LinkedIn profile.

"The high-level goal was to move away from just being an RSS reader or a news reader and move into — what you can see other companies moving into as well — is intelligence," Akshay Kothari, Pulse's cofounder and product lead for the current version of the app at LinkedIn, told Mashable. "How do we help you take thousands of articles written every day and get to the five that you really need to read?"

So how does Pulse create this handy algorithm? The app uses information like your job title, industry, company and connections to surface stories it “thinks” will be most relevant to you, as well as carrying over data from the publishers and groups you followed on the previous version. Also, a team of human editors who identify the day's most relevant stories by swiping left or right over an individual item in their feed can influence what shows up in a feed (like Tinder for news stories!).

Users can also now personalize the app’s suggestions, and that recommendation will improve over time as users read more stories and save or remove items from their feeds. What this means for franchise brands is a tighter, more concentrated avenue with which to amplify their news stories and recruitment messaging to prospective franchisees.

Strategically placing stories brimming with accolades, profiles, new openings and other lifestyle content in front of the right eyeballs could be key in converting PR into actual leads. Kothari added that the app will eventually be able to take other signals from your LinkedIn profile into account when surfacing news, like what industry you belong to or areas in which you're endorsed, such as entrepreneur and franchise-focused groups.

All this hammers home the point that brand pages should be using LinkedIn as a strategic vehicle to extend the lifeline of their press.