LinkedIn ads polls and live video-based events in a focus on more virtual engagement

With a large part of the working world doing jobs from home when possible these days, the focus right now is on how best to recreate the atmosphere of an office virtually, and how to replicate online essential work that used to be done in person. Today, LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it's trying to play a part in both of these: it's launching a new Polls feature for users to canvas opinions and get feedback; and it's launching a new LinkedIn Virtual Events" tool that lets people create and broadcast video events via its platform.

Despite now being owned by Microsoft, interestingly it doesn't seem that the Virtual Events service taps into Teams or Skype, Microsoft's two other big video products that it has been pushing hard at a time when use of video streaming for work, education and play is going through the roof.

The polls feature - you can see an example of one in the picture below, or respond to that specific poll here - is a quick-fire and low-bar way of asking a question and encouraging engagement: LinkedIn says that a poll takes only about 30 seconds to put together, and responding doesn't require thinking of something to write, but gives the respondent more of a voice' than he or she would get just by providing a like" or other reaction.

But as with some of the other social features that LinkedIn has implemented over the years, its timing has not been quite right. With polls, you might say it's been frustratingly late... or you might say it left the party too early.

The feature was first spotted by developer and app digger Jane Manchun Wong a couple of weeks ago, but it comes years after Twitter and Facebook have had polls in place on their platforms. I'd say it's taken LinkedIn years to catch up, but actually it had polls in place years ago, yet chose to sunset the feature, back in 2014.

You could argue that LinkedIn miscalled the direction that social would go with engagement, or that it took too long to resuscitate the experience, or that the novelty of the concept that now worn off. Or you might say that LinkedIn has picked just the right time to bring it back, at a time when people are spending more time online than ever and are looking for more ways of varying the experience and interacting.

Two important distinctions as you can see above, however, are that you are polling a very specific audience of people in your professional circle, and those people can both respond to the poll but also include comments and reactions. Both of these set the feature as it works on LinkedIn apart from the others and should give it some... engagement.

The polls feature is getting rolled out (again) starting today.

The LinkedIn Virtual Events feature, meanwhile, falls into a similar placement as polls: it's a way of getting people to engage more on LinkedIn, it taps into trends that are huge outside of the platform - in this case, videoconferencing - and it's something that is coming surprisingly late to LinkedIn, given its existing product assets.

But is also potentially going to prove very popular because it's filling a very specific need.

LinkedIn Virtual Events is a merger of two products that LinkedIn launched last year, a live video broadcasting tool called LinkedIn Live, and its efforts to foster a sideline in offline, in person networking with LinkedIn Events. The idea here is that while physical events have been put on pause in the current climate - many cities have made group activities illegal in an attempt to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus - you can continue to use LinkedIn Events to plan them, but now carry them out over the Live platform.

Given how huge the conferencing industry has become, I am guessing that we will be seeing a lot of attempts at recreating something of those events in a virtual, online context. LinkedIn's take on the challenge - via Virtual Events - could therefore become a strong contender to host these.

When LinkedIn first launched Events I did ask the company whether it planned to expand them online using live, and indeed that did seem to be the plan. LinkedIn now says that it accelerated" its product roadmap - unsurprising, given the current market - to merge the two products for targeted audiences.

That's why we accelerated our product roadmap to bring you a tighter integration between LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, turning these two products into a new virtual events solution that enables you to stay connected to your communities and meet your customers wherever they are. This new offering is designed to help you strengthen relationships with more targeted audiences.

This is not a simple integration, I should point out: LinkedIn is working with third-party broadcasting partners - the initial list includes Restream, Wirecast, Streamyard and Socialive - to raise the level of production quality, which will be essential especially if you are asking people to pay for events, and if you have any hope of replicating some of the networking other features that are cornerstones of conferencing and other in-person events.

It's also building on what has been a successful product so far for LinkedIn: the company says that Live has 23X more comments per post and 6X more reactions per post than simple native video.