With its AI-powered “Collaborative Articles” seeing an increase in weekly readership of over 270% since September, it makes sense that LinkedIn is now exploring new ways to encourage more engagement with the format, in order to get more users both contributing to and reading these posts.

LinkedIn’s latest update on this front is a new “Contribute Expertise” shortcut within its post composer, which links you through to all of the Collaborative Articles that you can contribute to, based on your expertise and niche.

As you can see in this example, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, some LinkedIn users are now seeing a new “Contribute Expertise” button within the composer flow. Tap on it and you’ll be taken to a listing of Collaborative Articles to consider.

Which will no doubt see more users contributing to these posts, because whether you like them or not, the benefit of contributing is that you can be awarded with a “Community Top Voice” badge in the app.

Which does imbue an extra level of credibility and stature to your LinkedIn presence.

That’s no doubt why Collaborative Articles have been so popular, with 4x increase in weekly member contributions quarter-over-quarter, but at the same time, that doesn’t explain why people are reading them.

My initial perception was that the lure of a shiny badge would see a lot more users looking to add their thoughts, though the format, from a reading perspective, doesn’t seem overly engaging. The questions that inspire each post are generated by AI, then pitched out to selected users. Given this, it seems like a pretty loose content format, which would be unlikely to provide significant value for readers.

But as noted, LinkedIn says that readership of these articles continues to rise, which means that its AI prompts are pretty good, and that LinkedIn users do want to see what members have to say in the app.

Which, I guess, does make sense. If you get a notification that a former colleague has shared his/her thoughts on a post, you’re probably going to tap through to see what they have to say. Whether people then scroll down to read the rest is another question, but either way, LinkedIn wins by driving more engagement, with less manual content effort.

With this in mind, Collaborative Articles may well continue to grow, and as such, it does make sense for LinkedIn to squeeze out as much engagement as it can from the format.

Maybe time to start working towards your “Top Voice” badge.