This is a continuation of our emerging series on the latest-and-greatest on Stories across multiple social media platforms and what that means to publishers. We will cover Pinterest Story Pins and Snapchat Discover shortly, but first we delve a little deeper into the most recent entrant in this space – LinkedIn Stories.
What are LinkedIn Stories
LinkedIn is the #1 professional networking site in the world, with over half a billion professionals on the platform sharing and learning from their business network. Pretty much every professional in the world is on LinkedIn and that includes publishers, both large and small. LinkedIn also has its own news product called LinkedIn News.
With that in mind, let’s try to understand what LinkedIn Stories is all about:
LinkedIn Stories are a great way to start lightweight conversations related to your work-life. Based on what we’ve heard from our members during our testing across the globe, the stories that resonate well are professional in nature, and make it easy for a response – for example, you could share a unique perspective from your work day, ask a question to your network, share insights on timely breaking news, walk through a product demo or teach others a skill.
LinkedIn for publishers
While LinkedIn is the best place in the world for any professional to post his / her daily status updates, and connect with everyone on their team, including colleagues, clients, etc. LinkedIn also is a huge platform for publishing news. Let’s see what ways we can use LinkedIn Stories, as a publisher.
Idea # 1: Build your publisher brand
Every professional at every publisher in the world is on LinkedIn. This is a great place to start augmenting your publisher brand, by adding authentic daily stories from your editors, journalists and others on LinkedIn. From day one, LinkedIn has been a great source of connecting with your community, whether it’s readers or your fellow journalists and stories might be a good addition to that.
Just because you’re a publisher brand, doesn’t mean you have to be buttoned up. There are millions of journalists on LinkedIn, and they have their own LinkedIn News platform, which means this might be an interesting way to break or cover news that you or your publication is after, which might give you a chance to reach a very unique set of audience that you normally wouldn’t be able to reach.
Since this is ephemeral Stories it also means this can add a human touch to your professional world, in ways that you might not have been able to connect with in the past.
Idea #3: Host corporate AMAs
Reddit might have made “Ask Me Anything” famous on their platform, but publishers, editors and journalists could open up their LinkedIn Stories platform to let the audience ask them questions, and who knows they might be able to find scoops as well, based on connecting with their network this way.
But most importantly, I bet publishers are asking if they can share their news on this platform like they might do on Google AMP Stories, and as far as we can tell today, that is not possible and LinkedIn Stories is professional, yet more personal like Instagram Stories and less an opportunity for publishers to grow their readership or viewership at the moment.
Rating: 3 / 5
Given that the tool isn’t fine-tuned for what publishers might be looking to grow their audience, we have to give this Stories Format a 3 out of 5, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for any updates, if for example LinkedIn adds Stories to their News Platform. Now, that’d be Breaking News! We’d love to hear from you on whether or not you think it’s a great idea to add LinkedIn Stories to your storyboard ideas! Please let us know in the comments below or find us on LinkedIn.
