Since this time last year, LinkedIn has gone hard out on video, as you won’t have failed to notice!
From the arrival of the standalone video feed to new video features and changes to how video displays, video has been front and centre.
It makes sense that LinkedIn would want to catch up with other platforms that have been making video easy for the longest time.
But it doesn’t look like LinkedIn has stopped tinkering yet.
Hot on the heels of announcing that a Tik Tok-style video feed would be coming to desktop, it abruptly disappeared, as has the app version in recent days.
That’s on the back of making videos more prominent on our profiles and in the feed, plus making them full screen, and adding a direct link to the creator’s profile in the app.
But there’s also a new newsletter from LinkedIn specifically about video so, as usual, it’s swings and roundabouts with the platform.
The disappearance of the standalone feed could be attributed to the fact that the videos appearing there were almost uniformly awful so we didn’t bother watching them or visiting the feed. Created by the likes of Gary V or distributed by huge organisations with plenty of advertising muscle, very few were from our own connections, with a few notable exceptions.
That said, videos from our friends and colleagues that did make the feed – usually thanks to help from LinkedIn News – received massive views. It helped if they were recorded in portrait mode, and between 1-2 minutes long.
One video feature reported late last year and never heard from again (although it still exists) is the live video post on iOS devices. Record a video and post it instantly – no editing required. It’s never been rolled out to Android devices and the fact it’s well-hidden means it’s unlikely to have had much airplay. That’s a guess though because it’s impossible to know if a video has been recorded and posted live or is just generally badly done.
Contrary to expectations that the standalone feed discourages engagement, my videos have risen half a percentage point in the past 3 months. And in terms of organic views, the two most popular were both videos, one of them very obviously backed by LinkedIn News.
So, do we rate videos for LinkedIn? Absolutely!
They allow our content to reach a much wider audience, perhaps including those who are less inclined to read.
They let our audience see a different side to us (around half my videos are filmed in my garden) and they show our competency in front of a camera, a highly valued skill in 2025.
Despite LinkedIn’s current dithering on videos (and it could all be different by the time you read this), it’s clear they are here to stay.