A Deep Dive Into Stories
It always happens whilst I’m away…
LinkedIn finally brought stories to the UK. Unfortunately I was too busy swimming in the crystal clear water of the Ionian sea to pay any attention to it!
Not only that, they also brought out another new feature just towards the end of the week that would have been really useful for the whole of my holiday but pretty useless right at the end!
So this week I’ve been spending lots of time experimenting and having fun with LinkedIn stories.
but first…
Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week
Events gets better but only for Company Pages
- Registration form where you can capture and download email addresses (this is apparently very clunky and only works for LinkedIn Live events)
- Ability to advertise to attendees
- Ability to go live to the event if you have Live on your company page
- Do a poll into the event
- Include a link to a speaker or speaker’s profile
- Automatic notifications to your company page followers whenever you add a new event
In addition some other features relevant to all are;
- Personalized event recommendations in the “My Network” tab
- A somewhat spammy sounding ‘weekly Events digest email sent to users’
LinkedIn Adds New Event Features
Microsoft quarterly results show activity progress and a positive financial recovery from LinkedIn.
New Insights in company pages
LinkedIn are adding some extra detail for admins as seen below;
When did you first sign up for LinkedIn? This used to be a very easy thing to see, right at the top of your settings
However since LinkedIn changed the design of settings, this appears to have disappeared!
The good news is that you can still find it, it’s just rather hidden away now.
LinkedIn Member Stats
New Video Feature
You can now add a thumbnail image to your native video post
New ‘away from office’ auto-responder in messages
This is described as being only available to Premium members which normally means Career & Business accounts but I only have Sales Navigator and had access to it. This is a great feature but fairly useless to me as I only got it on the last day of my holiday!
I do like the approach Ben Miller has taken with his away message!
New design for search
I don’t have this yet but my buddy Greg Cooper does and he put together this really helpful post;
LinkedIn Stories
As a starting point, I put together this tutorial for anyone who has not experienced the Stories format in other social media. LinkedIn like to believe that users will ‘figure stuff out for themselves’ whereas in my experience, many people give up on a feature rather than persist with it.
I genuinely think Stories have some potential on LinkedIn and I would encourage you to give them a chance. Too many people seem to be dismissing them as inappropriate for LinkedIn but that makes no sense to me, it’s just another medium for content but one that has the potential to add something different for your followers.
The first mistake people make is to dismiss stories because they see no visibility or ‘reach’ benefits.
This is 100% true
BUT they’re not about reach!
Stories are a way to enhance and strengthen your relationship with those who already follow you. You are very unlikely to get new followers from stories but you can use them to provide your most engaged followers with something else.
Stories have one big advantage over other types of content…they can be addictive!
Once you tap on your stories at the top of your LinkedIn homepage on mobile, they start playing and automatically move on to the next one. The key is to keep your followers interested and engaged so that they see that story through and onto the next one.
We all know that people buy from people and it’s important to build Know – Like – Trust. Well stories can play a big part in the like and trust parts of that. They offer you the opportunity to show followers behind the scenes and reveal a bit more about yourself…the sense is that this is more intimate, not for the world to see but just your select group of loyal followers.
That the ‘feel’ you should be looking to achieve.
I’m not suggesting it should be all personal, far from it but the occasional bit of fun and sharing something you wouldn’t in a post can go a long way, remember stories are only online for 24 hours and the temporary nature of that creates a different feel to them over a normal post.
I don’t believe it’s a realistic expectation to aim for engagement on Stories. Great if you can achieve it (comments are sent as a DM) because it will impact your relevancy and help to build a relationship but realistically I think most people are unlikely to engage in that way.
That said I love this innovative way of attempting to get people to engage from Jason Squires. Both these stories were videos with moving backgrounds and text, a clever way to get 20 secs rather than 5! I doubt many people voted though.
How to create a Story
Open your mobile app and look at the top left of your feed where you will see ‘Your story’. Ignore the company page stories – they will fail in the same way as page updates!
Now simply tap on +New Story
Now you have the option of either taking a photo with one tap of the grey circle or tap and hold to record a 20 sec video.
I would advise not doing either!
It’s far better to upload your own image or video by tapping on the picture icon bottom left.
An image post will show for only 5 seconds so don’t add too much text as many of your viewers may not realise that they can tap and hold to pause the story.
A video is for up to 20 seconds but unfortunately adding a longer one will simply cut it off at 20 secs – unlike Instagram where it will automatically create a second video for you.
For other tips, watch the video below
What I don’t like
As per usual LinkedIn have done their thing of copying a well established feature from another social media platform and somehow making it worse…or in other words ‘LinkedInfying’ it!!
- Stickers – A limited selection of which the vast majority look so bad they are unusable. Also there is no way of searching for one, you just have to scroll and scroll. There are also no animated stickers.
- Images – You can’t resize or move an image you upload. This is a technique commonly used in Instagram that helps with images taken in landscape.
- If I want to see your stories I have to scroll through all the stories at the top of my feed until I see yours. Stories should be shown in your profile under activity.
- LinkedIn have a question sticker available on some days but it’s set to their question of the day. This is crap, let me create my own question!
- The text fonts are very limited. The initial boxed text looks appalling and the plain text has pathetically washed out pastel colours only. Do LinkedIn have the first clue about design?!!
- Company Page stories are a joke, let me remove them as an option as they take up valuable space.
- Glitches – Box text often fails, stories get ⅔ of the way through and then start again and stories has crashed my app several times.
Hopefully most of the above are just teething problems and things will improve in time.
This post was nominated as well as a few others on the same subject. It’s an interesting debate and one that is bound to create engagement.
The first line in impactful and grabs attention. The structure could be better, more # used and nobody is tagged but it just goes to show that good content wins everytime over clever techniques.
On a similar theme, this post from Adam didn’t do as well as David’s but I wanted to feature it because I found the angle Adam has taken very thought provoking
