While LinkedIn is mainly an employment networking destination, the company has had its sights set on tackling some of the social intricacies that surround business interactions as of late.
For many people seeking to network around jobs, employment opportunities, and business connections, simply having an online resume destination is no longer cutting it. To that end, LinkedIn is evolving with the expanding demands of its user base and adding a handful of new tools and features to help accommodate the modern networking individual.
LinkedIn will finally let people natively upload videos to the business-centric social network through its mobile app. On Thursday, LinkedIn started testing the feature with a small number of users in the U.S. whose natively uploaded videos will play automatically with the sound off when they appear in people’s feeds. People can disable videos from playing automatically in their account settings. The company plans to roll out the video-sharing feature to all users worldwide “in the coming months.
The new video upload method will now enable a 10-minute long upload that can either be horizontal or vertical and provide the user with meaningful engagement metrics similar to Facebook and YouTube. While users can upload 10 minute long videos, LinkedIn engineers suggest keeping content limited to 30 seconds and 5 minutes for optimal engagement.
LinkedIn has offered video uploads to its service prior to the recent announcement, however, what makes the new testing different is that the entire experience is done through the native app rather than the separate app which rolled out last year for users.
In bringing the video-sharing option to its main app, LinkedIn will add a video camera icon next to the normal camera icon in the app’s status update box. People can click the new icon to record a video using LinkedIn’s in-app camera or upload clips saved to their phone’s camera roll.
As for details about a release date of the new feature or other roll out related news, LinkedIn has been a little dodgy’s simply reiterating that sometime later this year users will be able to natively upload their videos to the networking app.