By bbr

by Kelly Googe Lucas, marketing and social media manager

In keeping with the many recent changes rolled out recently by LinkedIn including personal profiles and business pages, the business networking website announced on their blog that they will be eliminating LinkedIn Events, effective November 26, 2012. From the LinkedIn blog post:

At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for all members. So from time to time, we take a look at our set of features to evaluate how they’re being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest our development resources in building more great LinkedIn products for members like you.

There are still many ways to spread the word about upcoming events. You can always share links about events from your homepage, or in relevant groups.

What’s that? You’ve never even heard of LinkedIn Events? Therein lies a big reason it’s going bye-bye – not enough people are using it because they just don’t know about it. I consider myself fairly well-versed with LinkedIn, having played around in it a good deal, but any time I wanted to create an event for a client, I had to go through a series of steps to remind myself where I could post or update an event. It’s never been a very user-friendly application, which leads to few people knowing of its existence and therefore even fewer taking advantage of it.

Personally, I think it’s a shame. The benefits of listing a professional event on the LinkedIn platform seem pretty obvious to me. Not only can people easily share events with colleagues, they can discover other events in their area and see those who are attending to learn where they can make the most of their networking efforts. It really held a lot of potential if only it had been better executed.

Instead of eliminating this application because it’s faltering, LinkedIn should invest in revamping and improving it, like they’re doing with so many other aspects of the website. Don’t make it an application that people have to manually add – just make it a part of the larger website. Make it easier and more intuitive to find instead of lumping it under the “More” tab. Make events easier to search by adding them as an option to the primary Search drop down menu. These are just a few things that could have made a big difference in wider adoption and use of LinkedIn Events.

So what do you think of LinkedIn getting rid of their Events application? We’d love to hear your thoughts.