If you thought LinkedIn had already reached peak undesirability, you were wrong: the company is now planning to add Snapchat-style Stories to its platform. Yes, the business-focused networking app that fills your inbox with recruiter and PR spam may be getting Stories. Cool.
We’ve been over this before —
Social media users have been suffering from Stories exhaustion for years at this point. It’s a feature that works great for its pioneer, Snapchat, and for Instagram… and pretty much nothing else — I mean, have you ever watched a Facebook Story on purpose? LinkedIn Stories inevitably promise to bring well-manicured, painfully corporate video clips to your feed as a way to mix up the approach to networking. Or, as the company puts it, to “bring creativity and authenticity to the ways that members share more of their work life, so that they can build and nurture the relationships necessary to become more productive and successful.” Vom.
Whatever floats your boat —
There’s no doubt LinkedIn is a useful tool for finding jobs and connecting with other professionals. But the more it slips into the social space, the worse it gets. There must be some people out there who enjoy perusing their LinkedIn feed, though. If so, this one’s for you.
Per a company blog post, Stories will help the platform speak the language of a younger, social media-savvy generation of professionals.
We’ve learned so much already about the unique possibilities of Stories in a professional context. For example, the sequencing of the Stories format is great for sharing key moments from work events, the full-screen narrative style makes it easy to share tips and tricks that help us work smarter, and the way Stories opens up new messaging threads makes it easier for someone to say, “and by the way… I noticed you know Linda, could you introduce me?”
We’ve also found there’s an entire generation growing up with Stories as a way of speaking; they’re more comfortable starting conversations with a full-screen ephemeral format than posting updates and prefer sharing content that lives as a moment in time rather than as an item in a feed.
How enticing! The company says it's currently testing Stories internally before expanding the test to members later this year.
