LinkedIn, which is a Microsoft-owned networking platform, has now revealed that it is shutting down its Stories feature that allowed users to post content that used to disappears after 24 hours, just like the Snapchat and Instagram stories. The company has said that it is replacing outgoing features with a “reimagined video experience” across LinkedIn that aspires to be more conversational and richer.
LinkedIn introduced stories in the year 2020, years after Big Tech.
In a blog post on LinkedIn about the discontinuation of Stories, the Senior Director of Product of LinkedIn, Liz Li, revealed that Stories were revealed in 2020 as a way to share quick, casual video format updates. LinkedIn was rather late to the party since Snapchat conceptualized the Stories concept in 2013, and it has since been replicated by Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, and others.
Advertiser campaigns for Stories will be discontinued after September-end.
Liz Li claimed that in the year when the stories were available on LinkedIn, she “learned a lot.” In a bid to simply embrace the mixed part of media and integrate it more tightly with your professional identity,” LinkedIn has decided to discontinue stories by 30th of September. Apart from that, any advertising campaigns that inserted advertisements between the user’s stories scheduled to continue beyond September will be going to be discontinued.
The replacement: Videos to share your expertise, professional story
With the stories gone, LinkedIn will be pivoting towards a short form, interactive and rich video format, with relatively high-quality performance. Liz Li noted that people want to create a long-lasting video that tells their professional stories in a personal way that is used to showcases the person’s personality and expertise. It will be amazing to see how LinkedIn adds such types of videos to the user’s profiles.
LinkedIn team is also working on a new project known as Clubhouse clone.
That said, LinkedIn followed in the footsteps of Twitter that also has discontinued its tweets feature known by the name as Twitter Fleets. The microblogging platform has replaced the Tweets Fleets feature with its Clubhouse clone called Twitter Spaces that looks like it to be more engaging with monetization opportunities opening up in the coming months. In case you sough to be too much curious, LinkedIn is also working on developing its variation of the Clubhouse audio-based discussion platform.
What are LinkedIn Stories?
LinkedIn stories are the image or video posts that disappear after 24 hours. Just like regular posts which are published to someone’s feed, stories can only be viewed by clicking on someone’s profile photo icon. For now, LinkedIn stories can only be accessed with the help of a mobile application, available on Android or iOS.
Here are few things which you should know about LinkedIn Stories:
- As soon as story is published, it is visible to followers and connections, but they can share your story with their 1st-degree connections with the help of LinkedIn messaging.
- LinkedIn page stories are public by default.
- People who used to view a LinkedIn story can respond with a message or emoji if they are the 1st-degree connections. Responses cannot be sent to the pages as of yet.
- The option to add “Swipe Up” has been tested, but as of now, it is not available.
- Just like on other platforms, Stories are majorly intended to create a space for the less formal posts and replace the water cooler moments that used to happen less now with remote work.
- “Through tests in various regions around the world, we’ve seen members adopt this format to connect more personally and less formally with their peers and friends,” says LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky in a blog post.
- Stories are as of now available in Australia, Canada, France, Netherlands, Brazil, India, the US, and the UAE.