LinkedIn's TikTok-Style Feed: The Good, The Bad...and Nothing's Ugly

Welcome to On Brand Content! In this edition: a 206-video test on LinkedIn’s new, TikTok-style vertical video feed, following its first 3 months of launch.

Backstory: In late March, LinkedIn began beta testing a TikTok-style feed in its app. As one of its first testers, I dove in with anticipation and excitement — and it paid off. Case in point: I posted a vertical video to the platform which got picked up in the feed, netting me over 30k impressions.

(Typically, if I can get a post over 3k impressions, it’s a big win for me.)

Above is the post that blew up. It’s a clip from Creator Upload, a podcast by Tubefilter which my business produces video for.

The test: Three months post-launch, across two distinct viewing sessions, I consumed 200 unique videos (okay, 206) on the feed to assess the following:

1. What formats get picked up / noticed? Plus,

2. (Test 2 only) How much of it is LinkedIn pushing LinkedIn products? (Learning, News, its own podcasts, etc.)

The results: 

• Test 1 (Friday): Of the 106 videos viewed, a staggering 101 of them were nearly identical — subject(s) looking down the barrel of the camera, speaking at the viewer, captions neatly placed at the bottom. I was in disbelief. It felt like Groundhog Day. Agape, I swiped and tallied — and the app finally crashed after 106 videos.

• Test 2 (Monday): Slightly rosier: of the 100 videos viewed, a mere 83 were direct-to-cam. In addition, 19 of the videos were “house spots” promoting LinkedIn Learning or one of its other internal media offerings. (I’m assuming these will be replaced by ads down the road.)

The quick takeaway: Here’s the brief good and bad:

• The Good: Video on the new feed = more views. In my case, 10x. That’s encouraging for all creators hoping to grow on the platform, despite last year’s revelation that LinkedIn doesn’t celebrate viral content. Gary Vee would call this tremendously underpriced attention.

• The Bad: My goodness, everything looks the same right now. Set up your camera, speak your script at it, put captions beneath…congratulations, you’ve just mimicked 89.3% of new-age business content out there. My prediction for the style: saturated by year’s end.

  • Silver lining: if you can create content in a truly original format, like The Dealership, you are going to crush it. (My business specializes in that 😉)

Finally, notably:

• Nothing’s Ugly: Credit LinkedIn’s hand-curation in beta, or the ease of today’s editing software — everything I saw met a certain standard of visual appeal. Most of it looked pretty clean.

  • Clean, but sanitary. A crisp edit doesn’t equal engaging content. Weirdly, I noticed that lots of content on LinkedIn is well-edited…just not well-produced.

Have you gotten access to the new LinkedIn video feed in your app yet? If so, what do you think of the content you’re seeing? I’d love to hear from you and get a conversation going — I can’t be the only one who has noticed this.

Adam

Adam Conner, author of the On Brand Content newsletter, is the founder of Authentic Avenue, a B2B media production and creative strategy firm.