LinkedIn shut off their events application on November 26, 2012. I’m sure some of you read the previous sentence and immediately thought, “what events application?!”
I’ve always felt this was a great feature of LinkedIn and one that not enough people knew about or utilized. I guess that’s a big reason why LinkedIn has decided to discontinue it. The application allowed you to create an event and promote it (to social media channels and within LinkedIn to your status update, a group discussion and/or private InMail to your connections). As people registered for the event, you could see who was attending from within your network and who was attending outside of your 1st level connections who you might want to meet.
During different versions of this application (they’ve tweaked it throughout the years) you could search on events geographically, by topic/industry, by date or by connections. The events application allowed you to recommend the event to others and to comment on the event. All of this event-related activity would show up in your network updates feed, which further promoted the event. Sounds great, right?
The biggest problem with the application was that you couldn’t fully manage an event with it. While you could promote it, that was about it. You couldn’t do payment processing if the event had paid admission, you couldn’t create tickets for the event, you couldn’t create detailed registration forms to collect additional information, you couldn’t automatically send out RSVPs, etc., etc. While it wasn’t perfect, it really was a great application and I’m sorry to see it discontinued. I wish LinkedIn had worked on improving the application instead.
Of course, you can continue to promote events through your own status updates and posting into relevant groups as a discussion or promotion thread. Perhaps they’ll replace it down the road or maybe even partner with another company that specializes in event promotion.
If you manage events, what tools do you use? I’d love to see a discussion thread for this post with recommended free sites and platforms! What do you like about the tool you use?
Arthur Catalanello Consulting 
I actually have never used or really wasn’t aware that this was even a function on Linkedin.. I think apps that cost money are a hard sell in today’s social media world, because there is probably another free app that does the same thing some place else. Thanks for tagging me in your post on G+!
Thank you for reading and commenting on my post!
The events app was actually a free app that LinkedIn provided to users who wanted to use it (much like Polls, SlideShare, Box.net, etc.
I wish they had spent more time trying to improve it and promote it to LinkedIn users for greater adoption. Instead, they made it hard to find and took away some of the functionality with their last update to it.
Oh, Ok, I was mistaken then about the fees.. I really think they would benefit if they promoted it better, because for example, one of the best features on Facebook is the “Events”
I had used it a couple times to promote fundraising events we were having, but didn’t get very much response from it. Maybe I wasn’t using it correctly myself. I guess there just aren’t enough people interested in finding and RSVPing to events on LinkedIn to make it very successful. Oh well!
Thank you for commenting on my post. LinkedIn certainly didn’t make it easy for people to find and I think that was part of this app’s problem. What are you using now instead?