LinkedIn, the business and employment-oriented social media service, is launching a new Events feature to allow people to plan, announce and invite people to meetups.
The free tool, which will appear as a menu item on the site’s website and app, is being rolled out first in English-speaking countries as of tomorrow (Thursday). While there is currently no option to create any ticketing or other limitations on attendance numbers, there are options to add links to third party sites, such as Eventbrite.
LinkedIn, which has around 650 million users globally, said it aims to expand to non-English markets soon after the initial launch.
Ajay Datta, the head of product for LinkedIn India, where the app was developed, said: “I think there is a massive whitespace for events today. People don’t have a single place to organise [work-related] offline meetups specific to an industry or a neighbourhood. People want to find other people.”
During a limited trial of the events feature in New York and San Francisco last year, LinkedIn said it created events such as meetups, training sessions, offsites, sales events and happy hours.
Events is free to use and is fairly limited in its first iteration, allowing users to create an announcement and invite first-person contacts. However, there is currently no way to promote the event beyond the users own organic reach on the platform.
“Targeting is not the focus right now,” said Ajay Datta, the head of product at LinkedIn India. “Organic adoption is what we are looking for first before we look at anything else.”
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