LinkedIn has announced it is currently testing internally, Snapchat-style stories feature to work out a new conversational format for business conversations.
Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s head of content products said that the goal is to meet LinkedIn users “where their voices are.” Stories would offer a lighter, more casual way of interacting in the business-focused world that makes up LinkedIn, instead of the formal messaging and posting that makes up the bulk of interactions on the site. For example, Davies imagines that a company might use stories to share “key moments from work events” or “tips and tricks that help us work smarter.”
The LinkedIn stories could be compared to the company’s video filters from 2018, a failed attempt at gaining a good share of relevancy and popularity of social networking apps in an attempt to grow beyond its dull, corporate identity.
Snapchat introduced the original stories feature way back in 2013 before Instagram copied the idea and gave it a higher degree of popularity in 2016. Other apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube, would soon follow.
Technically, this isn’t even LinkedIn’s first time dabbling in the social media story format: in 2018, it tested a similar feature called “Student Voices” that let college students post videos to a “campus playlist” that lived on top of the LinkedIn app.
But where the Student Voices feature was limited both in who could use it (college students) and what they could post (just videos, without the plethora of features that apps like Instagram offer), the new LinkedIn story feature sounds like it would be a much broader service.
For now, it cannot be guaranteed that LinkedIn will go ahead and launch stories to the broader public as it is being tested internally for now but there are plans for wider public tests in the next few months.
