LinkedIn is ditching Stories. The company will shut down the feature by the end of September, a year after rolling it out. As it turns out, ephemeral posts aren't a perfect fit for every social network. Perhaps with ROI and KPIs in mind, LinkedIn says its users want videos that stay on their profiles permanently, not ones that vanish.
"In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting," Liz Li, LinkedIn's senior director of product wrote. "Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise."
As such, the company's going back to the whiteboard. It's taking what it learned from Stories (such as users wanting creative tools to liven up videos in a professional way) to create a "reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational."
Just about every major social network hopped on the Stories bandwagon after the likes of Snapchat and Instagram found huge success with the format. Although the feature has proven a hit on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, Stories haven't taken off on every platform. Twitter recently shut down Fleets, its take on Stories, less than nine months after launching the feature.