Jeff Weiner wants LinkedIn to be the king of content marketing

As already reported here on SuccessfulWorkplace, LinkedIn beat expectations again and the news comes as no surprise that they’ve have met and exceeded expectations every quarter since going public.

But at the recent analyst call, CEO Jeff Weiner tipped the ante further by revealing his ambitions for the socio-professional platform: “One of the things that we’re increasingly focused on in 2013 is going to be the opportunity to support content marketing.”

Now do the math. LinkedIn has already pushed forth LinkedIn Today and the INfluencer streams in a big way, all frontpage headline acts we gravitate to as soon as we log in so it makes sense that this shapes the next phase for the platform. With 200m members and 2.4m companies listed there it’s a content goldmine. As Jeff put it, LinkedIn sees its future as a publishing platform for professionals.

“One of the areas where we’re making strong traction in is LinkedIn as a professional publishing platform. You see with the momentum we’re generating now in Influencers, LinkedIn Groups, Slideshare, people are increasingly turning to LinkedIn to publish professionally relevant content,” Weiner said. “We think that’s going to create a very strong platform and very valuable context for large enterprises, for small-medium businesses who want to target [and] engage with professionals.”

LinkedIn also wants to play big with ‘sponsored content’ much like everyone else but using their professional base to do it. Imagine you’re a company with a wealth of available content built over the years; Case Studies, Surveys, Whitepapers, Company Blogs, Weiner wants to be able to serve that content as a status update and target specific followers and they’re already working with the likes of Xerox, The Economist and Blackberry.

Jeff wants to be crowned publishing King of content and context as well as connections in the professional world, and with almost 10bn page views last quarter there’s a lot of eager eyes watching his ascension to the throne.