It’s the Friday before a long weekend, which means that it’s time for companies to drop their latest bad news, and LinkedIn has used the opportunity to quietly phase out a couple of creator features, including carousel posts, profile videos, and its in-image linking option.
LinkedIn has sent a letter to creators with a brief explanation of the changes.
As per LinkedIn:
“Thanks to your invaluable feedback, we’ve learned that some of our creation tools aren’t facilitating your ability to share all of your amazing experiences and expertize with your community. This includes carousels, profile video, and the ability to embed clickable links within the image or video of your posts. So, starting June 26th, we’ll be removing these tools, though your current posts will still be viewable.”
Carousel posts is likely the biggest removal, with carousels generating good levels of engagement for many users.
LinkedIn users had been posting makeshift carousel posts for some time, using its PDF attachment option, with each page shown as an individual, scrollable frame, before LinkedIn added a native carousel posting option in July last year.
But it seems like LinkedIn users haven’t warmed to it, so LinkedIn’s curbing the native posting tool as of June 26th.
So if you want to post non-ad carousels in the app, you’ll have to revert back to sharing PDFs, and using each page as a frame for your quasi-carousel post.
LinkedIn added profile videos back in 2021, and it never really seemed like a big winner.
The option gave you the capacity to share a short video clip that was linked to your profile image, while it added additional prompts for your profile video (as shown above) last year, in order to help people make better use of the option.
Evidently, that didn’t inspire more take-up, so that too will be going the way of the dinosaur before the end of the month.
Look, in the image above, she’s waving goodbye.
Finally, LinkedIn’s shelving its option to add clickable links to images and videos in the app, which it added in August last year.
That too seems to have failed to catch on – though it did seemingly add another way to drive referral traffic back to your site.
Either way, LinkedIn’s sinking that one as well, which is the final element in this feature review, taking away some of your posting options.
None of these is likely to have a huge impact – especially since you can still post carousels via the PDF link trick. But they will factor into some people’s LinkedIn process.
All three elements will be gone by June 26th.