Build with Ease: Introducing API Versioning and New Content APIs

At LinkedIn, our number one priority for our API partners is to make it easy for you to build on our platform so we’re constantly striving to improve and deliver a positive experience for our partners. 

We know that you work at your best when you have stable, intuitive APIs and predictable timelines for managing and adopting changes. That’s why we’re excited to share two new updates that will enable faster integrations, decrease troubleshooting, and streamline your work:

• API versioning: Manage changes with predictability and test new features with fewer disruptions.
• New Content APIs: Simpler and more intuitive APIs, so you can build quicker and adopt new content formats with ease.

With these updates, we’re putting you in control of the development cycle. These improvements will allow you to anticipate changes and provide you with better tools to develop new, interesting solutions for your customers. And ultimately, we believe they will allow us to better address customer needs together.

API Versioning

Whether you’re building community management or advertising solutions, we know that your work is affected whenever we make updates to the platform. Continuous updates, especially breaking changes, can be disruptive and make it harder for you to focus on development.

We understand how important it is for you to effectively plan your roadmap. To help you with this, we’re introducing versioning for all LinkedIn Marketing APIs – a more reliable way to release API changes.

With API versioning, you have more power to decide when and how to adopt API changes. There will be fewer breaking changes that require you to push updates by a certain date. You can manage updates in a way that works for you, based on your timeline. 

Today, we launched the first version: 2022-06. Following this, we will release a new version every month. Our goal is to support each API version for a full year.

To make it easy to keep up with the latest releases, every version has its own documentation that covers all Marketing APIs. We will continue to publish a changelog every month to outline what has been updated.

Learn more about how LinkedIn versioning will work by watching this video.

New Content APIs

LinkedIn is, first and foremost, a platform for users to connect and forge professional relationships. Great content is key to this, whether it’s sharing thought leadership pieces, announcing new products, or providing company updates.

Our organic and paid content formats are designed to help marketers grow their businesses. However, we recognize it has been hard to support your customers’ LinkedIn content creation needs because the existing APIs can be difficult to use. 

To resolve this, we’re introducing four new Content APIs that enable you to build quicker and to adopt the latest formats easier. According to Andrea Picardi, Product Director at BrandWatch, “it's way simpler [than the old APIs], and how we would like to work”.

The new Content APIs are: 

• Images to upload images for use in organic or sponsored content
• Videos to upload videos for use in organic or sponsored posts
• Posts for organic text posts, image posts and video posts
• Creatives for sponsored posts, dynamic ads, text ads, and more.

We’ve reimagined the developer experience and this is the foundation on which we’ll offer new formats and capabilities going forward. With the new APIs, we’ve reduced the required steps to upload creative assets and create posts. The new APIs allow us to provide consistency across different formats and maintain parity with LinkedIn’s native platform as we evolve. Most importantly, this means you can offer a great customer experience and grow with us.

Refresh your knowledge on LinkedIn content formats and learn how to use the new APIs with this video.

Get started with API versioning and Content APIs

The unversioned, legacy APIs will be available until June 30, 2023. Make sure to migrate to the new versioned APIs before then. We recommend learning more about the latest LinkedIn API updates by watching the walk-through videos and reviewing the documentation. 

These updates are just the beginning. In the coming months, we will continue to roll out new features to help you build with confidence, imagine new solutions, and effectively manage your integrations. Stay on top of the latest developments on our Developer News site. 

We look forward to seeing how you use the improved APIs to enrich your platform and explore even more possibilities on LinkedIn.