Why LinkedIn stories failed (and what that means for your Business)

Last week, LinkedIn announced that they’re scrapping LinkedIn Stories - a feature they only launched less than a year ago.

In case you’re not familiar with Stories, this is a feature that allows you to post content - outside of your main feed - that disappears after 24hrs.

It’s a concept first introduced by the social instant messaging app, Snapchat, back in 2013, before being adopted by Instagram in 2016, and then later Facebook, Twitter and eventually LinkedIn.

When Stories came on LinkedIn, there was much anticipation for the feature, as well as a fair dose of scepticism as to whether it would really work.

I was on the anticipation side.

I regularly use Stories on Instagram and Facebook so I thought it would be a good idea to also be able to use it on LinkedIn, my favourite platform, but unfortunately this particular story didn’t end well for LinkedIn!

So why did LinkedIn Stories fail and what business lessons can we draw from it? 

Here are my 3 reasons and lessons:

1) They tried to imitate 

In business, there’s a difference between modelling and imitating.

Modelling is when you draw inspiration from something or someone and adapt what they’re doing well into your own business and the way you work. 

Imitation is just straight up copying - with no adaptation.

LinkedIn had the opportunity to model Stories but instead they chose to imitate, and what they ended up with was a cheap version that didn’t function anywhere as well as the original.

In essence, they took what was already working…and made it worse!

Lesson here? Modelling is good; imitation kills.

2) They strayed a little too far from their centre of focus 

When LinkedIn Stories came out, lots of LinkedIn users complained that, “This is not Facebook, we don’t need this here.”

LinkedIn’s centre of focus, as a business, is their professionalism. There are tons of social networks out there but very few professional ones, with LinkedIn leading the pack in this area.

Right or wrong, most people make a distinction between their social life and their professional one - social is where you show the less-serious side of yourself, professional is where you don't (for the record, I don't believe in this distinction but we'll save that for another day).

The problem LinkedIn Stories had from the get-go was that most people associated Stories with social, not professional.

Those who had used it on other platforms used it socially, and those who’d never used it at all immediately saw it as a social tool - a departure from LinkedIn’s centre of focus as a professional platform.

This perception - coupled with the poor functionality of LinkedIn Stories - meant that general usage was low. The writing was on the wall from the beginning.

Lesson here? Adapt to changing times, yes, but don’t lose sight of your centre of focus - otherwise you’ll lose the trust of your audience.

3) They lost sight of the true needs of their audience 

In all the conversations I’ve had and have with people about LinkedIn - whether that’s clients, other LinkedIn coaches or general LinkedIn users - not once have I heard anyone utter the phrase, “I really wish LinkedIn would introduce Stories to the platform!”

Granted, your audience don’t always know what they need until they see it (reference point - Steve Jobs and pretty much all Apple products), but generally, if you listen to your audience they can provide you with some guidance on where you need to focus your time and energy.

LinkedIn lost sight of the true needs of their audience. Instead of creating products and features that people have actually asked for (e.g. revamping the LinkedIn Groups functionality), LinkedIn decided to follow the crowd and the end result wasn’t great.

Lesson here? Don’t do business in the dark - listen to your audience to figure out their true needs.

In the past year I have made a lot of changes in my business and not all of them have been successful. 

• When my engagement started to drop earlier this year, I tried to imitate other LinkedIn coaches and show up online in my content in the same way that they did. 

That didn't work.

• After working one-on-one with coaching clients almost entirely on their LinkedIn visibility in the first year of my business, I moved away from my centre of focus and started offering business coaching as my main offering.

Sales dipped significantly.

• Instead of listening to the needs of my audience who wanted more content on how to use LinkedIn to build their brand and grow their business, I experimented with other types of content in an attempt to give my audience what I wanted, not what they needed.

Newsletter sign-ups tanked.

All is not lost - the beauty of failure...

The beauty of failure is that failure is only really ever failure when you don't learn from it. 

LinkedIn may be temporarily down with this hit on Stories, but they're not out for the count.

They've learnt from the experience of Stories and they're planning to make a comeback with video in a different format that's much more in line with their business values.

I too have learnt a lot from my own failures and, as a result, I'm coming back better and stronger.

I have something really exciting coming that's designed with you in mind - totally and completely.

You will hear more about this in the next few weeks.

But for now, when was the last time you failed and what did you learn from it?

Hit reply to let me know.

Much love & blessings,

Connect with me here 👇

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GS KUMAR

(PS: I will be writing to you twice a week from now on. I'm reading, learning and growing all the time and I want to take you on that journey with me!)