LinkedIn planning its version of Instant Articles to rival Facebook

Professional networking site LinkedIn is said to be considering its own version of Instant Articles to rival Facebook's version, which allows publishers to host content. The Instant Articles programme is open to everyone offering a fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. For this, all you need to do is sign up for Instant Articles, then develop and submit your sample articles. You can then begin publishing them.

Sources with knowledge about matter told BuzzFeed that LinkedIn has been in discussions about the product with publishers that would enable users to publish their stories on LinkedIn.

A LinkedIn spokesperson in response to the latest disclosure said: "Publishers remain a very important part of our content ecosystem and we are in regular conversations with them about new ways to work. Our goal is to ensure we get the right content in front of the right member at the right time to deliver the best member experience possible."

Facebook was the first to provide the platform for publishers. Google also has the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, an open source initiative that is designed to load content instantaneously for publishers, consumer platforms, creators and users.

LinkedIn has been working hard to position itself as a resource for business news. In October 2012 the company introduced a feature that allows users to follow thought leaders on LinkedIn.

Alongside reading what the leaders say, you can also like and comment directly on their posts as well as share them. In addition, it lets users see longer form and original posts of leaders with videos, photos and slide shows.

LinkedIn also has a news aggregation app, LinkedIn Pulse, released in 2010. The app was integrated into LinkedIn in 2015. Pulse has a lot of content visible though LinkedIn's home page and every week about 130,000 original articles are published.