While most of us would want to think that the pandemic is on its way out, the reality is that it continues to disrupt live events and normal living, forcing entire industry groups to seek alternative ways to build networks and connections. In particular, LinkedIn has seen a rather significant rise in live events that it has hosted, with rates going over by as much as 150% YoY.

It’s impressive, but not totally surprising. After all, this is LinkedIn, the largest professional network in the world, where business leaders are constantly on the move to establish more professional connections. Now, LinkedIn is set to maximize its potential on this front by adding a couple of new elements to its live events tools, providing additional capacity to connect and interact within the platform.

The Optimal Link

To start, LinkedIn’s launching its own Clubhouse-like audio events platform, enabling users to tune into live on-platform discussions. Listeners can participate by raising a virtual hand to join as a speaker, or post likes and reactions in the chat. The format looks very similar in appearance to both Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, with separate panels for those speaking and those who just came to listen.

LinkedIn has been at it with audio tool development since March of last year, coincidentally during the peak of Clubhouse’s hype. While it’s taken LinkedIn quite some time to develop its own set of audio tools, it does stand to serve a valuable purpose within the LinkedIn environment, providing more capacity for various kinds of business and professional connections and interactions.

Discovery remains to be a key challenge for audio social tools and given LinkedIn’s professional focus, which helps to greatly diminish the likelihood of encountering spam and off-topic discussions, it could be well-positioned to highlight more relevant sessions for each user. LinkedIn’s also using the format of its audio rooms as a template of sorts for other live meeting features, including video events and solo live streams.

All this expands the platform’s capacity to host virtual discussions, bringing industry leaders together through new formats, which could be hugely valuable for LinkedIn in expanding the usage of its platform to host live events. Ideally, of course, though we’ll eventually be able to return to IRL events, having features like these around helps us all better adapt to ever-changing situations, especially now that this OMICRON variant stands to make us live with the virus for longer than any of us would care for.

The Wrap

Regardless of whether the virus truly leaves or we just learn to cope with it, the shift towards hybrid work models is something that has become the focus of most industries and businesses. In a way, remote work has delivered more opportunities and is more resistant to damage when opposed to tying 100% of operations to physical office spaces.

As employees shift away from major cities, potentially impacting the capacity to get business leaders to come together, the availability to host virtual meetings and summits could ensure that such sessions still happen and that business continuity remains secured. LinkedIn states that the new options will be tested by “a few thousand creators who will host events across different topics and themes”.

Subscribe to our ‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media news, strategies, updates and trends to take your business to the highest level.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3qYKeIk