In recent weeks, NextBillion has gradually begun to shift our approach to disseminating our content, in response to ongoing changes in the social media landscape — and to broader trends in the social impact and global development sectors.

Our goal in making these changes is to bring our content to the attention of more entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and others who can benefit from it, while also promoting more open engagement with other thought leaders and organizations. 

To that end, instead of “talking at” our audience by sharing content that almost exclusively comes from our site, we’re shifting to a more balanced approach that also focuses on “talking to” readers about our shared efforts and experiences. Under this new approach, we’ll strive to maintain a balance between sharing our own content, and highlighting posts and discussions from other voices across the sectors we cover. 

I’ll briefly summarize this evolving strategy below.

Reaching New Audiences on Social Media

NextBillion has consolidated and refocused our social media efforts: Going forward, we’ll post to two social media platforms: Bluesky and LinkedIn.

We’ve created a presence on Bluesky and we are working to build an audience there. Follow us there for regular posts highlighting original NextBillion guest articles, news items, events and other content — along with posts from other voices and organizations. 

We welcome you to tag us in your own Bluesky posts related to impact-focused business and development in emerging markets: We’re eager to reshare content from others who are expanding their engagement on this exciting new platform. We hope to see more familiar faces from the impact and development sectors joining the growing community there in the coming months and years.

Doubling Down on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has long been seen as a social media platform that you only visit when you’re looking for a job. But in recent years, it has quietly become the central public forum for sharing content and engaging with others in the impact and development sectors (while remaining a very useful resource for finding work).

In light of LinkedIn’s growing importance, and our evolving efforts to foster open engagement on social media, we’re expanding our usage of the platform in the following ways:

• In response to the growing need for employment resources in this age of uncertainty, we’ve ramped up our aggregation of job opportunities on NextBillion’s jobs board. We’ll highlight these jobs in a new weekly LinkedIn newsletter, “Jobs in Impact and Development,” which will include every new opportunity we’ve posted in the past week. Click here to subscribe — and for more opportunities, subscribe to our weekly BizDev in Emerging Markets newsletter, which shares links to accelerators, competitions, fellowships, funding, incubators, RFPs and courses available to businesses and entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries.
• We’re renaming and shifting the focus of our “NextBillion” LinkedIn Group: Instead of naming it after our site, we’ve renamed it “Business Innovation in Emerging Markets.” And instead of exclusively sharing our own content, we’ll also highlight LinkedIn posts from other organizations and leaders — covering topics ranging from promising new business models to persistent challenges in key sectors —  in an effort to help foster discussion and knowledge sharing. The Group is public and all are welcome to join, comment and submit items for consideration. If readers respond enthusiastically to this new approach, we may create additional LinkedIn Groups in the future, around different topics in emerging markets business and global development that aren’t already being covered by existing Groups.
• We’re about to start the process of migrating our weekly newsletter from MailChimp to LinkedIn, changing its name from “NextBillion Notes” to “Business in Global Development.” The newsletter’s content won’t change: It will continue to highlight both original NextBillion articles and jobs, events, bizdev opportunities and news links curated from other organizations and publications. We will continue to publish the newsletter once per week, and subscribers can continue to receive each edition in their email inboxes (while also having the option of viewing it on LinkedIn). So you may be wondering: If the content and publication schedule will remain the same, what’s motivating this change? Our main goals are to enable more reader interactivity, and to tap into new audiences: Subscribers of LinkedIn newsletters are able to comment and engage with other readers, and individuals and organizations receive notifications if they are mentioned. We’ll execute this transition over the course of the coming weeks. During that time, we’ll continue publishing our existing MailChimp newsletter, encouraging subscribers to sign up for the LinkedIn version: Once we’ve given existing subscribers several weeks to make this shift, we’ll discontinue our use of MailChimp and publish this newsletter exclusively on LinkedIn.
• We’re continuing to post all of NextBillion’s original articles, and a curated selection of our news items and calendar events, on our LinkedIn Page, while also posting a variety of jobs, business development opportunities, articles and events from other organizations and thought leaders that are active on the platform. Follow our Page for updates, and tag NextBillion if you’d like to draw our attention to an item we might reshare. 

New Policy on AI in Guest Articles

Finally, we’d like to announce one additional change that’s unrelated to social media, but nevertheless important to our site: We’ve updated our Writers’ Guidelines to reflect our new policy on the use of artificial intelligence in original guest articles. As the new policy states: “We don’t accept articles written by artificial intelligence (AI). If AI is used in researching, revising or proofreading a guest article, the author must ensure that any sources cited are legitimate, and that the text consists of the author’s original work: If we find stats or sources fabricated by AI, or uncredited text taken from other published works in a guest article, future article collaborations with that author will be reevaluated.”

We believe that AI tools can be helpful to writers in many ways — but they have downsides, including a tendency to fabricate sources, and to “help themselves” to content made by human creators. At the end of the day, our goal is to provide a platform for human thought leaders to share their original views and insights with others working in emerging markets business. AI can play a role in assisting these writers, but the insights they share must be their own.

We welcome you to contact us if you have any questions or thoughts on the above approaches. Thank you, as always, for reading and engaging with NextBillion.

James Militzer is the managing editor of NextBillion.

Image credit: geralt, via Pixabay