By bbr

by Sarah Warlick, copywriter and editor

It’s about to get a little more time-consuming to post content to your LinkedIn Group with the loss of RSS Support. If you’re involved in running a group on LinkedIn, you recently found this notice when you logged in: As of Mar 15, 2013, we’ll no longer support RSS feeds in LinkedIn Groups. This has a lot of group administrators irked and puzzled. The annoyance stems from losing a highly convenient and very popular tool for feeding content from your favorite sites directly to your group. The puzzlement comes from wondering why on earth the networking site would cancel support, considering how popular the service is and the minimal effort it requires from LinkedIn to offer it.

For those who haven’t used it in this context, RSS lets users directly post content from targeted sites to a Group, so there’s always something relevant to share with group members even when you’re not writing an article of your own. As LinkedIn has become more popular in the professional networking world and thousands of readers turn to their groups for daily industry news and commentary, it has become common practice for many group owners and users to rely on the service.

After March 15^th, everyone who wants to contribute to a group will be forced to upload or link articles manually, one by one. While this change will reduce the possibility of group spam, most users resent the change, feeling that group owners were doing a fine job on their own of controlling the flow of information to retain a high level of relevance and quality.

It seems that the very popularity of LinkedIn as a platform for sharing high-quality content may have contributed to the decision to end RSS support. The company has plans to add sponsored content in lieu of advertising for mobile users in the near future, and has been openly pushing their role as a publishing platform in recent months. In an article published in CNet, Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, talked about the company’s rise as a publishing platform:

“One of the areas where we’re making strong traction in is LinkedIn as a professional publishing platform. You see with the momentum we’re generating now in Influencers, LinkedIn Groups, Slideshare, people are increasingly turning to LinkedIn to publish professionally relevant content,” Weiner said. “We think that’s going to create a very strong platform and very valuable context for large enterprises, for small-medium businesses who want to target [and] engage with professionals.”

Popular opinion has it that the end to RSS for groups comes in preparation for charging those who use the site to publish original content, now that many LinkedIn groups have become an important vehicle for sharing industry-specific insights.

While we can’t say for sure what this step means, that theory seems logical, though unpleasant. What do you think – will the lack of RSS support make a difference to the way you run your group or share content? Would you change your use of the site if they began to charge for using or hosting groups? Can you think of another plausible reason to remove RSS options? Give us the dirt!