Have you, active LinkedIn user, ever wished there was a more efficient way to rebroadcast the stuff your employer posts? If so, then you will be very happy to hear about Elevate, a new service that aims to help you do just that. Marketed primarily to our corporate overlords, Elevate is a specialized interface for LinkedIn that gives regular users a feed of highly-curated content that is geared toward their employer's needs along with some nifty analytics tools.

Elevate exists to cure what LinkedIn has deemed a problem on the still-trying-to-be-used-by-regular-people social network: only about 2% of the content a company shares is then reposted by employees of that company. "What a bummer," these corporate pages surely think. After all, LinkedIn users have 10 times more connections than their impersonal employers' pages. If your goal is to get company-sanctioned conversations started, there is a very big problem indeed.

For now, Elevate is in a closed beta, accessible only to employees of participating companies. You can download the app and sign in, but you will not be allowed access unless you work for one of those pre-selected firms. In addition to the Android app, it will be available on the web and iOS.

While Elevate doesn't take away your autonomy as a pawn in the bureaucracy, it wants to at least ensure that you lay eyes on all the stuff that your boss might want you to share. After all, lots of people use LinkedIn but aren't exactly sure what to do. It seems like you need a presence, which requires some sort of activity, but who knows what you should posting? Now you have your answer.

In fairness, there are more legitimate benefits to the end user. Elevate offers the ability to see the reach and impact of your postings with app-exclusive analytics features. LinkedIn claims that, in their pilot testing, those who used Elevate received four times as many profile views and twice as many connections as non-users (my scientific methods senses are tingling). While I'm a little skeptical of the logic that led to those numbers, it is doubtlessly going to be better for your LinkedIn impact if you are using the service more. This is where Elevate has one more trick up its sleeve: it allows for scheduled posts, a la Buffer.

Elevate might be just another all-too-blatant attempt at revenue generation by LinkedIn, but it's hard to fault them for doing something different. I'm not sure that anyone is getting enough value from the service right now, whether it is the average users, the businesses advertising and recruiting, or LinkedIn itself. If companies can be convinced to pour money into Elevate and users can see past the advertising and value the analytics and scheduling features, it just might work out.