An early look at the new LinkedIn Events feature

One of the things we hear from LinkedIn members is how important face-to-face meetings are to build relationships with their peers, colleagues, mentors, and other people they work with. In fact, our data shows that nearly 80% of LinkedIn members consider professional networking to be important to new opportunities and success. Whether it’s an alumni happy hour, industry networking event, casual meetup, or a team offsite, events are a great way for professionals to take the online communities they’ve developed and bring them to life.

We already see millions of people talking about and sharing professional events on LinkedIn -- for example, thousands of people shared their experience and insights from the Grace Hopper Celebration and we see members organizing LinkedIn Local networking meetups all the time.

That’s why we’re piloting a new LinkedIn Events feature to make it easier for members build their professional relationships in-person. With Events, members will be able to seamlessly create and join professional events, invite their connections, have conversations with other attendees, and stay in touch online after the event ends.

We’re starting with a pilot group of event organizers in San Francisco and New York, but will be rolling out the feature globally to all members in the coming months. All LinkedIn members are able to join and participate in events they’re invited to.

Here’s what you can expect with LinkedIn Events:

• Create an event: Whether on desktop or mobile, event organizers can create an event and provide all of the details for it - a description, date and time, a unique hashtag so people can follow along.

• Promote your event: Hosts can invite their connections and share the event with their network to encourage other people to join. Attendees can also invite people in their network that might be interested.

• Manage your event: Organizers can easily track attendees and invitees, post updates, edit the details if the time or location changes, and follow-up after the event.

• Have conversations with fellow attendees: All event attendees will be able to chat with each other in the event page feed before, during, and after the event to share their excitement, meet one another, share videos and photos from the event, and continue strengthening their relationships.

• See who else is going: Attendees can take a look at the guest list and use our search filters to see who else is going, what industry they work in, and more.  

This is just the beginning - in the future members will also be able to easily discover relevant events they may want to attend, organize private events, and much more.