The End of LinkedIn Audio Events: What’s Next for Hosts?
For what seems like the longest time, I’ve been advocating the use of LinkedIn events in corporate marketing.
LinkedIn makes available two types of on-platform events, audio and video. The latter is known as LinkedIn live and requires a third-party app.
Audio events, by contrast, sit on their own platform within LinkedIn and like lives can be used by personal profiles and company pages. While they have limitations – no replay or comment thread – they have the advantage of ease of set up and use. Plus, serious audio event hosts have figured out a workaround for the absence of a replay or comments.
Attendees like audios for their ease of access and the ability to network with other attendees whose profiles they can click on while the event is live. They can also, should they so choose, raise their hands to be brought onto the stage to join the conversation.
We’ve been running fortnightly audio events for three years and in that time they’ve built a solid audience of return attendees. They also help us build our network as each event provides a pool of people we don’t already know and aren’t connected to.
This week, however, LinkedIn pulled the rug out from under audio events. From the end of December, the audio platform as it stands will no longer be available. Audio events are being moved to the LinkedIn Live platform.
This caught the entire LinkedIn community by surprise. And given its audio hosts little time to pivot or build a new audience on another platform. The audio platform that became so popular during Covid, Clubhouse, is only a shadow of its former self and is unlikely to attract its former room hosts back.
Audio hosts like us are well positioned to take advantage of this move because we already run LinkedIn Lives, have a paid account with one of the approved third-party apps and understand how it works. That said, we have a LOT of questions about how audios will look to attendees and how to use it at the back end.
Principal among our concerns is how easy it will be to add audience members who wish to speak on the stage as they will require a specific link we will not want to make publicly available. This massively reduces the spontaneity of audio events.
On top of that, lives traditionally don’t display who is in attendance, only those who have agreed to attend, reducing network building opportunities – one of the key reasons we run them.
Audios-as-lives will resolve the in-platform absence of event replays and comment threads which LinkedIn knows from members has been an issue. But its solution creates different problems and, to do well, increases costs. The platform we use for our lives, StreamYard, currently costs us $NZ76 a month. In many cases it also requires more than one person to effectively run events, although some hosts manage quite well to do them solo. (I am not one of them!)
The upshot of this is two-fold. From the end of next month, audio events will become scarce in your Message inbox. Current audio hosts without an existing LinkedIn live presence will wait and see what others do and how the new platform looks and behaves.
Meanwhile, those set up to do so will move to the new platform and carry on as before. They are likely to be in the minority.
The question now is: has LinkedIn effectively killed audio events? That we will have to wait to find out.