Microsoft-owned business and employment-focused social platform LinkedIn plans to add games and a vertical-scroll feed of short videos. But the career-centric platform will still be all work, even as it adds play. The intent is to have the TikTok-like video feed filled with professionally themed content, and the games will be geared toward relationship building, while also potentially getting people to spend more time using LinkedIn. The video feed is in the test phase, while code hinting at the direction of the gaming feature has been discovered by some astute app watchers.

Games called “Queens,” “Crossclimb” and “Inference” were among the early discoveries that appear to be leveraging the public’s puzzle-mania. It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two other well-known social networks,” TikTok, and what used to be Twitter, writes TechCrunch.

“Wordle’s viral growth kicked off on Twitter, leading The New York Times to dole out a reported seven-figure sum for the web-based word game. And TikTok is well past the billion-user mark, recently becoming the first non-game app to hit $10 billion in consumer spending, all for short-form video.”

As disillusioned Twitter users splinter from Elon Musk’s reinvention of the platform now known as X, LinkedIn sees an opportunity to pick up some market share, TechCrunch notes, reasoning that “we’ve all got LinkedIn accounts and we’ve all turned to it at various times when we needed to, like when we’re looking for a new job or trying to network. And now it is serving as the obvious fallback as the bird app flounders.”

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn seven years ago for more than $26 billion, and has been low key about the investment. But recently it’s taken to touting the platform’s accomplishments, revealing that it made $15 billion in fiscal 2023. It also said premium subscriptions generated $1.7 billion last year, “the kinds of numbers that Musk can only dream of over at X,” TechCrunch chides.

As services including YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and even Netflix have scrambled to add short-form video feeds, LinkedIn seems to also think its users can benefit from the trend, and has been “showcasing the new feed, which lives in the app’s navigation bar in a new ‘Video’ tab,” TechCrunch writes in another article, explaining that “once you tap on the new Video button, you will enter into a vertical feed of short videos that you can swipe through.”

Users can “like” videos, leave comments and share the clips with others. “The company didn’t share details about how the feed determines which videos to show users,” TechCrunch says.

As for the games, TechCrunch reports “one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organized by places of work, with companies getting ‘ranked’ by those scores.”

Related:
LinkedIn ‘Playing With’ the Addition of Games to Its Platform, PYMNTS, 3/17/24
LinkedIn Is Testing a TikTok-Like Feed for Vertical Video, Engadget, 3/29/24
Why Has LinkedIn Become So Weird?, The Guardian, 3/27/24