“Courteous does not take away courage,” says an old phrase. And so, very politely, LinkedIn announced that stories will cease to exist on its platform . In this way, then, the company follows in the footsteps of Twitter, which had been the first of the “big platforms” to get off the train with the closure of Fleets.
According to Liz Li, product director at LinkedIn, the experience related to stories will no longer be available from the end of September . One of the reasons behind this decision is that the concept of ephemeral publications did not finish to please the users of the social network.
But beyond the bitter pill that involves removing a feature that does not finish working, Li highlighted the process as a learning. “ You want the videos to live on your profile, not to disappear . When developing the stories, we assume that people would not want informal videos to be attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would lower the barriers to how people feel about posting. It turns out that they want to create long-lasting videos that tell their professional story in a more personal way , and that show both their personality and their experience “he said.
Stories didn't work on LinkedIn
Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash The stories arrived on LinkedIn in early 2020, as an internal test, and spread among registered users. However, was not the platform's first attempt to adopt a feature of this style . In 2018 they had already presented something similar, called Student Voices, but it was limited to students from the most important universities in the United States.
The truth is that, although the stories did not work on LinkedIn, the social network intends to continue betting on multimedia. According to the announcement, the stories will cease to exist as such but will evolve into a video experience that will be “richer and more conversational” . It is not yet really known what the company will bet on, but they promise that there will be news in the near future.
With Twitter and LinkedIn abandoning the story boat, it is anyone's guess if other firms will opt for the same. The story format still seems to be attractive enough to attract new players, such as TikTok.
