LinkedIn adds Q&A style videos from its biggest “Influencers”
Business-centric social media site LinkedIn Corp. is finally entering the video space, following in the footsteps of rivals sites like Facebook, Twitter and others. But unlike the rest, LinkedIn is treading carefully at first, and will only allow a select bunch of users to answer questions put to them, in a similar fashion to how Quora works.
LinkedIn said yesterday that its 30-second Influencer videos will begin showing up in user’s feeds immediately. To begin with, LinkedIn has invited fifty of its influencers to respond to questions pertinent to their area of expertise in the form of a short video. For now, regular users can only watch and respond to the videos.
As well as showing up in your feed, the Influencer videos can also be seen on their own page on the site. The page offers a list of video responses to different questions, and lets regular users respond with their own comments. Check out this example response to a question on artificial intelligence from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
LinkedIn’s Influencers are a hand-picked group of more than 500 of “the world’s foremost thinkers, leaders and innovators”, and include individuals such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Guy Kawasaki and Arianna Huffington, among others.
Adding video seems to be a smart move for LinkedIn, and the only real question is why it didn’t do so earlier? After all, video is one of the biggest growth areas for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, which have added numerous video features to keep users on their platforms for longer. Video also helps to drive more video-based adverts, giving social media sites a significant new income stream.
The move comes just weeks after Microsoft said it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion deal. Just days after that announcement, Microsoft said it was in the process of building a new video service called “Stream” that would be a kind of YouTube for companies and organizations.
Image credit: LinkedIn Corp.
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