Back in April, LinkedIn announced Elevate as a way to help businesses get their employees sharing content on their behalf. It piloted with Adobe, Unilever and a few other companies in Q1, and became available on an invitation-only basis upon announcement.

Now, LinkedIn Elevate is reportedly rolling out to the masses. This is according to AdAge (we haven’t seen an official announcement yet), which shares some words from LinkedIn:

“LinkedIn members have always been able to share content about their companies, but it hasn’t always been easy for them to do so. And sometimes they’re not sure about the company’s ground rules or what types of content to share,” said Penry Price, VP-marketing solutions at LinkedIn.
 
“Elevate enables employee advocacy at scale,” he added. “Now employers have an entire employee base to be activated so they can share content across their social and professional networks.”

The product is aimed at the enterprise – specifically companies with at least 2,000 employees. It comes in the form of an app that’s separate from LinkedIn itself. The point is that employers can share content with employees, who can then share it to their own personal networks, which are likely to be more in tune with the employee – based on job – than with the business itself. Businesses have to pay for access.

According to LinkedIn, the average employee has ten times as many connections as a company has followers. It also says that people are three times more likely to trust company information from employees than from the CEO.

Elevate isn’t just about sharing a company’s own branded content. It also provides content that can be curated by employees. It includes algorithmic content recommendations from LinkedIn Pulse and Newsle, so employees can share additional relevant content. Of course they can share anything they find on their own as well.

Elevate is essentially a competitor to products from Hootsuite, Salesforce, and others. It includes analytics both for employees and companies. Employees can look at how many times the content they’ve shared has been liked, commented on, and reshared, as well as how many people it reached. Eventually, LinkedIn says they’ll also be able to see who viewed their profile and requested to connect as a result of the content they shared. The companies get the same data as well as things like job views, Company Page followers, hires, leads, and sales.

LinkedIn said in its initial announcement that during the pilot, employees shared six times more often than in the months leading up to it.

There are Elevate apps for Android, iOS and Desktop.

Image via LinkedIn