Stories are about to become the common thread that unites a bit all social networks. After Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, now it's LinkedIn's turn
Large to young people, wide open to Stories: also LinkedIn, the "serious" social network dedicated to the world of work would be testing its own version of the Stories initially introduced by Snapchat and then also by Facebook and Instagram. But it would be a more professional version of the stories of other social networks, called "Student Voice".
The first test was made among American college students, allowing them to spread through LinkedIn's "Campus Playlists" short videos to get noticed by companies, also sharing parts of their daily life and school successes. This test has been confirmed by LinkedIn to TechCrunch, a sign that the Microsoft-owned platform is serious about this new feature and should soon launch it globally.
What's different between LinkedIn Stories and Instagram Stories
The main difference between LinkedIn Stories and those of other social networks lies in their duration: no longer a few hours but an entire week (as should also happen on YouTube), to give more visibility to this content of students who, not being workers yet, don't already have professional achievements to share in order to stand out. With the same system, students can also share any research projects they are pursuing at university that might be of interest to companies. It is, therefore, one more possibility to find a job after college: the headhunters of large companies, on the other hand, also look at the character and personality of candidates before hiring them and from reading the simple LinkedIn profile is very difficult to guess them.
Not only Stories
There is also another aspect to evaluate: the Stories are not only useful to students, but also to LinkedIn that has an extreme need to spread among young people, who today do not represent the largest part of the users of the social Microsoft. Precisely for this reason, as discovered by the social expert Jane Manchun Wong, LinkedIn is testing other features already seen on Facebook: the "reactions" and animated gifs. The first are in "serious version": among the reactions, in addition to the generic "Like" we find "Applause", "Interesting", "Mmm" and "Support", while the gifs are more playful and can contain anything from a bowl of ice cream to the meme of the moment. So much so that some are already wondering if all these new features aimed at young people might not jeopardize the credibility and reputation of users in the eyes of companies.
Finally, it's very interesting to see that while LinkedIn tries to steal some audience from Facebook, Facebook in turn tries to steal it from LinkedIn: Zuckerberg's social network, in fact, in February announced a new feature to search for jobs, in August presented a new system to find trainers within a group and on November 14 announced the launch of "Learn With Facebook", an educational portal that competes directly with LinkedIn Learning.