Happy birthday, LinkedIn Messaging

A little over one year ago, we launched Messaging on LinkedIn. To be fair, we’ve offered our members messaging almost since the very beginning of LinkedIn -- conversation is core to all of the opportunities LinkedIn provides. But our relaunch completely transformed the experience to be more lightweight, responsive, fast and easy-to-use.

We were happy to get overwhelmingly positive feedback from our members who found it easier to be more productive and successful in their conversations, but we were surprised at how much this shift in user experience would change member behavior.

Some call-outs, since the re-launch:

• Messaging activity has grown more than 250%.
• Messaging is now the second largest transactional driver of member activity to LinkedIn
• In one year, more than 500 million premium opportunities have been shared (these are conversations with recruiters and other outbound professionals), with responses and conversations climbing as a result.
• Every week, there are more than 40 million interactions squarely focused on networking (e.g., celebrations of new promotions, work anniversaries and appearances in the news).
• (And these opportunity and networking conversations represent the minority of all conversations on LinkedIn Messaging -- our members are getting advice, getting work done, and getting connected faster than ever before.)
• Globally, Messaging has increased engagement in our key markets -- we’re seeing growth in India and Brazil especially that outpaces the rest of the world, which isn’t surprising given the mobile-first, messaging-oriented nature of these regions.

We’re proud of these accomplishments and hearing testimonials from members about how their professional lives are being changed, but we know we have a lot more work to do. Thanks to member feedback, we’ve prioritized a ton of improvements that you’ve requested.

Here's some highlights of what's coming:

Read Receipts, and Typing Indicators. It'll be easier than ever to get more responses faster, and continue active conversations. On mobile and desktop, you will be able to see when someone is typing, and when they've read your message.

Contextual Desktop Overlay. You’ll soon be able to continue your conversations on nearly every part of the desktop experience -- without leaving what you’re doing. We’ll also provide more context in those conversations, so you’ll better know who is the right person at a company or your network to message with, and even suggest the right words to say to get things started. So if you’re not a wordsmith, or if you’re just a little shy, we will give you an edge in getting started.

Reconnections: Networking is tough, but we're making it easy with this mobile feature that shows you a summary of what some of your connections have been up to, and helping you reconnect with that person with a topic or context, and even suggesting potential words to say to help you get started on the right foot.

Scheduler Bot: We’re working on bots and anticipatory features that will help our busy professionals get more things done. Meetings are the bane of existence for many of our outbound professionals, so for our first experiment, we’re working on ways for a messaging assistant to help schedule meetings by suggesting optimal times for everyone in a conversation to meet based on their calendars, and then scheduling those times -- all with a few simple commands and without leaving the conversation.

Archive, Sent Messages, Filters: For our power members, we’re investing in ways to help our members prioritize the most important conversations and networking opportunities.

To be clear, this isn’t just talk about roadmaps and wishlists -- these are all projects that are in active development and different stages of being tested and rolled out to the world -- you’ll start seeing some of these enhancements in the coming weeks. Expect how they look and behave to evolve quite a bit as we get member feedback on how to improve here. And obviously, much more is to come.

You can see a video of some of these announcements from our recent press event below (I start the video where VP Engineering Erran Berger is demonstrating some concepts of how the news feed and messaging are working together -- Messaging's demo comes after).

Ultimately, we’re focused on how can we help our members be more successful and productive everyday. There is a ton of buzz about Messaging, Bots, Artificial Intelligence and the like out there. We’re going to do our best to cut through the hype and build useful, practical solutions to making your everyday professional conversations better than ever.

It’s only through your feedback that we improve, so I invite you to continue to share with us your suggestions. I promise to read everything I can and share with the team so we can get better for you. Thanks for everything you’ve contributed so far in our journey together. Happy birthday!