LinkedIn continues its push to be a more feature-driven platform when it recently announced that it’s going to begin Testing its own version of Stories.

“There are more conversations taking place in the LinkedIn feed than ever before, with a 25% year-over-year increase in engagement,”  said Pete Davies on LinkedIn’s blog announcing the news. “Last year, we started asking ourselves what Stories might look like in a professional context. Stories first appeared on Snapchat, with other platforms like Instagram and Facebook adopting them soon after. They spread for a good reason: They offer a lightweight, fun way to share an update without it having to be perfect or attached to your profile forever.”

This isn’t the first time LinkedIn has released a comparable feature to Instagram or Facebook. Over the past few years, LinkedIn has introduced features like Newsletters, Trending News, Live Video, and Reactions to the platform.

The original “Stories” was first introduced by Snapchat back in 2013 before Instagram famously copied the idea in 2016 and brought a whole new level of popularity to the feature. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp quickly followed suit, inciting a trend of “[insert name of thing] will now have stories” memes.

Stories on LinkedIn seek to provide a more comfortable environment for up-and-coming professionals to share their business-related experiences. The platform hopes that the feature may help to give potential employers a better look at those who utilize it, without having to sacrifice their more casual Stories over on apps like Instagram or TikTok.

LinkedIn Stories is currently being tested internally, with plans to roll the feature out to all members in the coming months. Technically, this isn’t LinkedIn’s first flirtation with the social media story format: in 2018, it tested a similar feature called “Student Voices” that allowed college students to post videos to a “campus playlist” that existed on the LinkedIn app.

Student Voices was limited both in who was able to use it (college students) and what type of content they could post (Student Voices was limited to video content, and was absent of all the cool filters and features of Stories videos on competitor platforms like Instagram). However, the new LinkedIn story feature appears to be a much broader service.

It should be noted that while LinkedIn is actively testing this Stories feature, there is still no guarantee that LinkedIn will actually launch Stories to the general public: as of now, it’s only being tested internally, with plans for wider public tests “in the coming months.” We will be monitoring this story closely as it develops.

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