Hello and welcome to this weeks show.

I was both surprised and encouraged to see LinkedIn announce that they are currently testing a new feature: Stories

This short form, 24-hour type of content was made popular on Snapchat and Instagram.

Will it work for LinkedIn?

More of that later but first;

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

This LinkedIn user made the tabloid (gutter) press this week.

They clearly didn’t get his ironic humour!

Tata Sky drags LinkedIn to Delhi HC over false representation by certain profiles

New Ways to Bring Equal Access to Opportunity

Feedback from last weeks episode

I would strongly advise making sure you have your website link or content you most want to be seen as the most recent ‘media’ in your About section even if you don’t have ‘featured’ yet because those that do will see it in your profile.

Andy Lopata got in touch with me about last weeks post of the week to confirm that the BBC article hadn’t been featured in ‘today’s news & views’ at the time although more recently it had and his post was listed underneath, however, interestingly he saw no increase in views or engagement as a result. The initial spike in engagement must have been as a result of engagement from one or a few high influencers.

Never underestimate the power of visibility

This week I was reminded of the benefits of being consistently visible in the feed of those who follow you.

I was chatting to Louise my partner and telling her that I had just won a nice piece of business with a company who had been referred to me by someone who claimed to know me well whereas in fact I had met this person once, many years ago and could hardly remember them! I felt slightly uneasy that this client had booked me on false pretenses but Lou reminded me that the person who referred me probably did feel that they knew me well because they regularly see my content and comments in their feed (they may also listen to the podcast) so whilst I didn’t know them, they genuinely felt they knew me well enough to recommend me.

A useful reminder of one of the reasons we spend time on this platform!

LinkedIn Stories

Pete Davies from LinkedIn published this interesting article this week

Click on the image to read the full post and comments

My thoughts

This seems like a very positive new direction for LinkedIn.

I can see Stories being used for;

• Events and conferences
• A video equivalent of a doc post – a story building through 15-sec videos
• Sharing tips and quotes (text, video or images)

Stories make sense because they are a format familiar to a younger generation who are now using LinkedIn.

The short, temporary nature (viewable for 24 hrs) of Stories lends itself to a platform where people are typically very time short (as opposed to rambling, lengthy live videos).

Storytelling has been proven to be very popular on LinkedIn and I see this as being an excellent way to visually tell stories

I expect this will only be available on the mobile app which is a shame but Pete has suggested stories will be delivered in portrait format and I can’t see how that would work on desktop.

Instagram stories allow the viewer to send a DM to the publisher and Pete has suggested they will allow the same. I’m a bit concerned that this could be dangerous on LinkedIn unless they restrict DM’s to connections and not followers you are not connected with.

Ads are inevitable although I suspect they won’t appear for a while.

Because you can’t like or comment on a story they can’t really go viral and therefore I don’t see them being a great visibility tool, in addition, they are going to have limited engagement opportunities (no conversation thread). In essence a story is largely a broadcasting tool, not a conversational one.

I think it would be important to allow users to upload their own videos rather than just record them through the app, this way we will be able to add captions.

Overall I’m very excited to see how this develops. LinkedIn have not stated when it will start to roll-out although Pete did reply in the comments thread stating “it won’t be long”. The challenge will be to educate users to post and view stories. Even on Instagram, I’ve noticed that many of my followers only seem to notice posts and miss the Stories at the top of their feed. I suspect it will be the same on LinkedIn.

I expect this to be a useful but not especially important feature of LinkedIn going forward because due to a likely low adoption by users and the lack of engagement (no comments or likes) it’s unlikely to be a powerful visibility resource.

What do you think?

Thanks to Craig Langley for nominating this brilliant, thought-provoking post. It’s an excellent example of a subject that resonates with most of us but especially the largest audience on LinkedIn (middle to senior management)

A first for the show this week. I have a LinkedIn question to ask you!

Why is it that you can see the video view number on someone’s native video post whereas on other occasions you can’t? I can see no logical explanation and LinkedIn have not been able to provide an answer (they didn’t really understand the question!)

This video shows the view number

Yet the one below, posted at about the same time shows nothing.

Initially, I thought it might be because the first one has more views and engagement but then I found other videos with much more reactions and comments where the view number didn’t show!

I’m mystified…any ideas?