LinkedIn is the largest professional social network. It has existed since 2002 and is currently used by more than 600 million people in 200 countries. Many of us use LinkedIn as a place to expand contacts and find career opportunities. In addition to job seeking or employee recruitment, it is also used to improve a person’s professional reputation by publishing media content and / or commenting on other people’s posts.
A professional social network unveils something new
The format of publishing content is similar to most social networks – a text is published with an attached photo, video or link to a website. We’d say that’s all it takes for everyone to have relevant content among colleagues from the business community, but LinkedIn’s top executives thought they needed something more. In September 2020, new options for LinkedIn users were rolled out, in a format that’s already familiar from other social networks – stories, ie, posts with a limited duration of 24 hours. It seemed that even this option would only encourage constant growth and further increase the total number of those using LinkedIn. But exactly a year after the launch, something shocking happened – LinkedIn has confirmed that it will abolish the story format on the last day of September 2021.
What happened?
Among the key insights from the year-long project, LinkedIn says that the user response showed the following:
- users want their story-like content to live on after 24 hours and be available on their profile
- users want more creative tools to create interesting videos across the platform.
As a result, LinkedIn will incorporate these two elements into their next video project they are developing to replace Stories. Still, it was worth experimenting because they know for sure that stories aren’t the way in which they will perfect themselves. They can now focus on the elements that worked in the story format and get the most out of them.
It turns out that stories are not the unique feature that will achieve great success on all social media platforms. LinkedIn found that users liked the idea of more video content on their profiles, but Stories weren’t the right approach to it.
Reasons for cancelling LinkedIn stories
In the announcement, LinkedIn admits that it has made incorrect assumptions regarding what users want from an informal video product, such as stories.
“In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting. Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise.”Liz Li, LinkedIn Senior Director of Product, said in a blog post. In other words, users liked Stories, but they didn’t like the fact that they were disappearing. Maybe users felt like it wasn’t worth the effort to create stories for LinkedIn knowing they weren’t permanent.
Really, it’s probably not a big surprise that LinkedIn Stories failed. Most experiments with this option have shown limited reach and clicks, and LinkedIn seems to have become increasingly desperate to increase the number of story views in recent months. They even tried posting their own team’s themed stories to fill the story bar with top-notch content.
Interestingly, LinkedIn isn’t the first social network to give up on the story feature this year. Earlier this month, Twitter closed its platform, that’s similar to Stories, called “Fleets” with the explanation that it was used by a few users.
At the same time, the popular, video-focused social network TikTok recently announced that it is implementing stories for its users. Other social networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Pinterest and YouTube still offer story-like platforms too.
Stories, which were first made popular by Snapchat, before being copied by Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Skype, Spotify and TikTok, refer to short pieces of content lasting only a few seconds that are automatically erased after a short period of time.