• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 18, 2015

As part of a broader content push, LinkedIn is relaunching its newsreader service Pulse as a dedicated mobile app. With the new Pulse, LinkedIn is addressing what appears to be a sharing problem among its roughly 350 million members.

“Instead of slapping features on to the old reader app, we decided to completely redesign the new Pulse experience from the ground up,” Akshay Kothari, a Pulse Product Lead at LinkedIn, explains in a new blog post.

To deliver personalized news experiences, the new Pulse app draws from each users’ network of professional contacts and other telling information.

“You don’t need to follow publishers or topics or anything,” according to Kothari. “Just log in with your LinkedIn account, and Pulse instantly gives you today’s news based on the industry you work in, who you’re connected to and what you follow on LinkedIn.”

“You don’t need to follow publishers or topics or anything,” according to Kothari. “Just log in with your LinkedIn account, and Pulse instantly gives you today’s news based on the industry you work in, who you’re connected to and what you follow on LinkedIn.”

A new cards-based interface was designed to help users skim through lots of content quickly.

Stories that miss the market can easily be “dismissed,” while highly relevant stories can be saved for later, and authors can be followed. “All these interactions will continuously refine your content recommendations,” Kothari notes.

LinkedIn acquired Pulse in 2013 for $90 million, and shortly thereafter released a redesigned version that was more closely wedded to its own platform.

While the company’s ad business remains healthy, it is unlikely to increase market share through 2017, according to a recent forecast from eMarketer.

LinkedIn’s display revenues will increase from $310 million in 2015 to $430 million in 2017, the research firm projected, which would leave its share unchanged at about 1.1%.

Among other efforts, LinkedIn recently began testing Elevate -- a new product that encourages companies and employees to curate suitable content, share it across social channels, then measures the resulting impact.

LinkedIn Elevate combines algorithmic recommendations from Pulse, along with Newsle and human curators, said Will Sun, a product manager at LinkedIn.

Adobe, Quintiles, Unilever and several other companies have been experimenting with Elevate -- and with what LinkedIn says are solid results. Employees participating in the pilot program shared six times more often than in the months leading up to the test, the social network found.