Business and employment social media platform LinkedIn has announced it is launching a six-month inaugural podcast academy, following the success of the LinkedIn Podcast Network.
The LinkedIn Podcast Academy, which officially launches 20 March, will feature 19 participating shows from emerging business podcasters and will help them expand their audience and connect with fans through exclusive programming, coaching tools, and LinkedIn co-branding. Fans of the shows will also be able to interact more with the podcast by finding the conversations around it exclusively on the LinkedIn platform and engaging with the hosts through their LinkedIn profiles.
“At LinkedIn, we want to meet our members where they are. And increasingly we are finding that the world’s professionals are turning to podcasts to get the insights and inspiration they need to accelerate in their careers, boasting more than 460 million listeners globally,” said LinkedIn head of original programming Courtney Chapman Coupe in an announcement post. “But listening is just the start: It's when we come together to talk to each other and share ideas that relationships deepen and new concepts form. Podcast hosts have not had ways to incubate the conversations and the trusted supporters who come out of them.”
Podcasts that will be taking part in the LinkedIn Podcast Academy cover various areas in the business world, from entrepreneurship to marketing and so on. Examples of the participants include The Black Fundraisers' Podcast with Kia Croom, Women in Tech Podcast with Espree Devora, and Entrepreneur Struggle, with Chris Colbert.
The podcast academy initiative builds off of the success of the LinkedIn Podcast Network which launched in February 2022 and showcased a number of award-winning in-house and partner podcasts such as Brown Table Talk with Dee C. Marshall & Mita Mallick, and news podcast Get Hired with Andrew Seaman. The program enables the hosts to build a community with their fans by engaging with them through posts, newsletters, LinkedIn Live events, and more.
The accelerator joins a number of podcast organisations and communities that exist to support up and coming podcast creators, including The Podcast Academy, which has an annual seasonal mentorship program that connects creators with industry experts that guide them through their individual growth goals. The current mentorship program started running in February this year and the next round will start in the fall from August 2023 to November.
