LinkedIn launches share button..finally

With the launch of the LinkedIn ‘Share’ button this week, corporate blog content and website articles can now be easily shared with professional networks on LinkedIn.

If you click a LinkedIn Share button on a website or blog, you will be asked to login with your LinkedIn account, and then you’ll be able to share a URL (with the network’s shortener) in your status update box.

According to Techcrunch the option to share content via a universal Share button makes sense for the network, since users already tend to share business content such as news, whitepapers and presentations with their contacts. Significantly, the button will show how many shares have been made for a particular piece of content – data which will be of particular use to publishers on the type of content that readers are sharing with their contacts.

Until recently LinkedIn has lagged behind other social networks in building connections to external sites – Facebook has its ‘Like’ button and Twitter its retweet one. The move will build on other strategies implemented by the social network this year (improved groups functionality, integration with Twitter) The Share button is part of LinkedIn’s broader strategy of bringing LinkedIn to platforms that people may use in their professional life, including Twitter and corporate blogs.

Publishers can embed a branded LinkedIn share button with a few lines of code from LinkedIn’s ‘publishers’ page, onto their sites and choose between three options for the share button: vertical with a share counter, a horizontal button with a counter, or a horizontal button with no counter.

The button is already implemented on sites including Bloomberg, the Huffington Post and Mashable with take up already evident.