RIP LinkedIn testimonials, 2020-2021

You might be thinking, “Why the hell did LinkedIn, the purgatory of social media, rip off the Stories format?” »LinkedIn asked the same question less than a year after doing it and apparently concluded that there is no good reason why it shamelessly followed all other apps with the launch of his own imitation of stories.

Stories, first made famous by Snapchat before it was copy paste in Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Skype, Spotify, and TIC Tac, refers to short pieces of content that automatically remove themselves from public view after a certain amount of time. According to AdAto give, LinkedIn announced in a Tuesday blog post that it shut down the format by the end of September and that it began notifying advertisers and all users who even knew the feature existed in the first place of its impending demise. The Microsoft-owned company’s marketing solutions teams wrote in the post that all advertising campaigns scheduled to continue beyond that date will be halted. AdAge said the move will primarily affect brands and advertisers who have paid for their content to appear between other users’ stories or either promoted on newsfeeds.

The blog post clarifies that LinkedIn will instead switch to a “rich and short interactive video format,” which we hope but can’t hope to be a little less deadly:

As of September 30, 2021, we are removing the current Stories experience and you will no longer be able to create Stories for Pages. And any picture or video ads that you plan to run between stories will be shared in the LinkedIn feed instead. If you promoted or sponsored a Story directly from your Page in Campaign Manager, those Paid Stories will not appear in the LinkedIn feed, and they will need to be recreated in Campaign Manager as an image or video ad.

As we reimagine the sequel, our focus is on how we can provide you with a rich and short interactive video format that is unique to our platform and that better helps you reach and engage your audience on LinkedIn.

In a separate blog post, Liz Li, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, explained that the company “assumed that people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that the ephemeral would reduce the barriers people feel about posting. “.

“It turns out you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and your expertise,” Li added, which is a polite way of saying. that no one asked but LinkedIn’s ad sales team. .

An announcement post from September 2020, when LinkedIn rolled out the feature to all users after months of testing, appears to have been made inaccessible.

LinkedIn stories appear to have been little used and, at least anecdotally, consisted mainly of youendless workfluencer content and weird, newsworthy downloads of hikes.

Maybe desperate to be something, something beyond a repository for obsolete resumes, unsolicited spam and daydreams with dead eyes of business leaders, LinkedIn has launched or tested a number of features in recent years, including Voicemail and live video. Earlier this year, he began testing his own clubhouse clone, the audio chat room app that claimed to be worth $ 4 billion based on a peak of interest during the coronavirus pandemic but has since waded.