If you happen to follow some prominent people on LinkedIn like Guy Kawasaki or LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman then you won’t just be seeing whatever business and entrepreneurial advise and they and other influential personalities on LinkedIn are sharing. There will be some short videos too.
Really. Videos are coming to LinkedIn. It’s not just your Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (what else?) and other social platforms online that need you to consume more and more video content. The one place that prides itself for matching people professionally wants in on the action too.
LinkedIn is tapping its community of influencers (over 500 of them) to roll out the new feature. The influencers will post videos up to 30 seconds long which can then be shared and commented on by every user. LinkedIn could open up the feature to all users someday but for now, the feature is limited to the hand-picked influencers who will be free to share short videos on just about anything from career advice, business tips, popular culture stuff, education, innovation etc mostly in a question and answer format to encourage interaction.
For instance, one of the very first videos on the professsional social network was answering the question “What is the first thing in your office that AI (Artificial Intelligence) will take over?”
LinkedIn, which boasts of having over 400 million users, announced in June that it was being acquired by Microsoft.
Videos may be one of the ways it plans to “bring life” to the platform or simply a way of providing its professional user base with more ways to interact with one another.