Professional Business Network

Professional social networking site LinkedIn introduced a new feature on Wednesday created to boost participation in professional conversation within its one million Groups through polling. Polls within groups will be rolling out to all members over the next few days, the company said.

According to LinkedIn’s principal product manager Ian McCarthy, group moderators on LinkedIn have been looking for “easy, time sensitive ways to generate conversations within the group,” and features that have been available to them so far, such as article sharing or blogging, weren’t suitable for obtaining quick insights from group members.  To provide a functionality that answers to these needs, LinkedIn designed Polls in Groups giving group managers “a simple way to unlock the insights of the members of the group.”

“A key reason our members use LinkedIn Groups is to share insights with like-minded professionals,” McCarthy said in a post on LinkedIn blog.  “Voting on polls now provides the same quick convenience of clicking “Like”, but with also the richer point of view of a comment. Any member of LinkedIn can vote on a poll, just as they can “Like” any discussion or comment in an open group.”

The new feature allows any group member to create a poll. Still, group managers have the control over the creation of new polls and can restrict it to managers and moderators only from their Group Settings.

In November LinkedIn posted its Q3 2011 report revealing that the world’s largest professional social network is growing steadily with over 131 million members and more than one million groups. During the third quarter, more than 15 million people joined LinkedIn which represented a 63% increase in growth rate compared to Q3 2010. The company also reported a drastic increase in mobile user engagement, with mobile page views beating last year’s numbers by 400%. LinkedIn’s growth was also reflected in revenues which saw a sharp climb vs. Q3 2010 and reached $139.5 million for the quarter.

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