LinkedIn has just made changes, very good changes, to its mobile site. This is not the same as its mobile app, however, rather the update is to the in-browser mobile site. LinkedIn claims 11% of its page views are in mobile devices and the growth rate on the views is near 400% over last year.
The immediate change is the ease of sharing. Links and some content are dragable into a dialogue box in the upper right corner. LinkedIn also allows the user to instantly tweet about the shared info as well decide with whom the content is to be shared.
Another nice feature is what happens when a user clicks on content shared by a contact. Instead of loading the entire article, LinkedIn will display a summary of the article. That saves time and bandwidth, which is important on a mobile device. The content summary also still allows the user to open the profile of the person sharing the content.
The site is also very easy to navigate into a groups setting instead of seeing all contacts and all the shred content they have provided. This seems to be one of the biggest advantages because it helps trim the fat for each session, which is important for mobile sessions.
All in all, the updates seem to be about making LinkedIn a preferred social network destination for users on mobile devices. While that does not directly translate into more dollars or views for the social media marketing agency on the network it does boost the importance of the network. The more people using the service in mobile settings does drive the more use in non-mobile sessions where there is branding to be done.