LinkedIn used to be simple: it was a place where jobseekers could show off their CVs, companies could post job opportunities, and everyone could meet and make beautiful employment together. Think of it as Tinder for work. But the platform has been adding more and more features for many years, from personalized news feeds to recommendations for training courses.
This was all part of the professionally oriented social media platform’s big effort, stated in 2014, to “create a map of the digital economy, its participants, and every facet of opportunity linking these nodes together.” LinkedIn’s latest push into seizing every “facet” of online opportunity is to jump aboard the short video craze typified by TikTok, even as the social video meme site faces a U.S. ban.
Website TechCrunch reports that the new video format appears under a new “video” tab in the app’s top navigation bar. Clicking on this takes you to a page featuring the short, vertical-format videos. They’re displayed in a long feed, just like many other social media apps. Viewers can apparently like a video, leave a comment or share it with other members–exactly like you can on all the other similar sites. This may elicit shudders if you’re already fed up of “doom scrolling” through X, Instagram, TikTok and so on.
So, what is the purpose of all this?
Worry not that you’ll see hordes of startup CEOs waving their arms too fast and twerking through an impenetrably complex sequence of dance moves in these videos, attempting to tap into the meme economy with their own version of Elon Musk’s famously nerdy dance performances.
TechCrunch says the new videos are all about boosting “engagement and discovery on the platform.” That makes a certain kind of sense, since we’re all getting used to vertical-format videos on lots of different platforms, and you can certainly get a lot of information across via audio and visuals in a short, pithy video clip. LinkedIn even explained that videos, which have long been a feature of the site, are becoming one of its users’ favorite ways to get information.
In this sense the TikTok-style video is just another part of LinkedIn’s employment social media act–another way for people to share info, find info, and possibly connect about work opportunities. The push also aligns with recent evidence that some startup founders have been using TikTok as a portal to reveal more personal insights about themselves and their businesses. LinkedIn would surely love for that to happen through its social media systems instead, particularly if TikTok gets banned.
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