LinkedIn adds celebrate, love, insightful and curious reactions to spur more engagement

Sometimes a “like” in social media doesn’t give the full picture, or you’re just not inspired enough to write a fuller response. Today, LinkedIn addressed that issue on its own platform, with the introduction of four new reactions people can use in response to posts in their timelines. In addition to “like,” you can now react in four other ways to posts with icons that indicate “celebrate,” “love,” “insightful” and “curious.”

I find it “curious” and “insightful” that there isn’t a “haha” among them. Not many laughs or entertainment to be found on LinkedIn, I guess?

The reactions are rolling out globally to the company’s nearly 600 million users starting today, to both the desktop and mobile apps.

LinkedIn’s rollout comes in the wake of similar moves on other social platforms, perhaps most noticeably on Facebook, which launched an expanded set of reaction buttons more than three years ago. LinkedIn has never been one for jumping quickly to new trends, but this nevertheless shows that it’s listening and understands that it has to provide more to users to make its platform more dynamic, to help spur more engagement (and in turn more people posting to the platform).

LinkedIn product manager Cissy Chen notes that the company based its selection of reactions on the kinds of conversations that people are already having on LinkedIn (and probably the kinds of conversations that LinkedIn would like to continue to encourage), and also what people were writing most commonly when providing one to two-word terse responses.

Typically, posts range from people announcing new professional roles or milestones to sharing learnings from somewhere else — hence the leaning to two reactions giving encouragement, and two more contemplative reactions.

LinkedIn’s wider goals in providing tools like this are to continue to get more users engaged on its platform.

In the years since Microsoft acquired the company, I’d argue that the iterations the company has made to different aspects of its service have decreased somewhat. That makes it more open to other companies coming in and creating more useful and modern replacements in some of its most lucrative areas of business, such as recruitment.

On the other hand, platforms like Facebook have been quick to add ever more features and functionality. While Facebook is far from providing the same kind of recruiter tools, or database of working professionals and their experience, its own efforts in recruitment services and mentoring are direct competitors to LinkedIn’s social tools for the working world, and provide a kind of lite alternative. So for LinkedIn to continue to keep people around, and to attract new users who might otherwise consider alternatives, even incremental additions like this one can make a difference.