LinkedIn’s publishing platform expands beyond English to Portuguese; German and French to follow

LinkedIn is expanding its publishing platform beyond English today, with the news that it’s launching a version for Portuguese speakers.

LinkedIn’s evolution as a publishing platform has been ongoing for years, but it got a major boost in 2012 when the social network invited established entrepreneurs and public figures, including Richard Branson and President Obama, to write articles through its Influencers program.

The initiative was opened to all LinkedIn members in the U.S. last year, letting individuals share their thoughts and experiences with other members. The invitation was then extended to members in all English-speaking countries back in January.

LinkedIn posts differ from status updates in that they take the form of a proper article, such as How to Sell Anything. Users can share, comment, and follow the author in question.

Today’s launch to the Portugese-language market comes two months after LinkedIn relaunched Pulse, its news digest app. Integrating with the wider LinkedIn publishing platform, Pulse taps myriad news sources from across the Web, as well as offering its own organic content — more than 100,000 original articles are published each week through LinkedIn’s platform.

To date, LinkedIn says that one million people have published more than three million posts, so the next obvious step is to open things up to new languages and markets. LinkedIn has been testing in Brazil over the past few weeks, but from today it’s opening up to Portuguese speakers everywhere.

LinkedIn says that German and French markets will be added in the coming months, with more tongues thereafter.