I can say undoubtedly that I am a heavy user and a fan of LinkedIn. It’s the social networking channel that is open in one of my browser windows through the day. Apart from allowing me to expand my professional network LinkedIn lets me to do a lot else that helps me grow and do newer and more interesting things in my profession as a technology analyst.

I find sharing of articles, blogs, event invites etc. on LinkedIn definitely very useful and serious stuff.  Many people in my network share articles, write-ups, etc. that are insightful and worth a read.  However, on a number of occasions, I don’t have time to go through some of the interesting articles as-they-surface on my LinkedIn home page. I definitely want to read them and absorb the insights, but…at a later, more convenient time, perhaps in the evening while sipping a cup of tea at home.

Unfortunately, by the time, I reach home the LinkedIn home page has changed. Some interesting articles / write-ups shared by my connections, that were at the top in the morning are not to be seen, unless I scroll deep down and make an effort to spot them. A possibility is that I open the particular article link and bookmark it in my browser, but that is a tiresome and boring process.

How wonderful it would be, had there been a bookmarking option within the LinkedIn app itself.  Ideally, I would love to, and I am sure many other LinkedIn users would also like to bookmark some interesting reads for later consumption.

My suggestion to LinkedIn would be to enable bookmarking from within a user’s account directly on the network wherein I could ‘flag’ interesting posts for reading them during my spare time in the evenings or over the weekends. This bookmarking could be made more user-friendly still by allowing me to create categories where I could organize similar posts.

LinkedIn has undoubtedly become one of the world’s leading social media networking professionals.  Worldwide it has over 200 million users of which more than 15 million are in India. I am sure a sizeable fraction of these users regularly share a link within their network. But users do not have the option of reading these at their own pace. Either they have to read articles ‘on-the-spot’ or otherwise take pains to retrieve the piece. I believe that just by introducing this bookmarking feature, the click through rate (CTR) of links shared on LinkedIn will increase substantially.

Although I have not undertaken any empirical study to substantiate my hypothesis, I am open to partner with LinkedIn to do so. The results of such a study could directly provide pointers that lead to better traffic and advertising revenues for the social media giant.