Should LinkedIn add a Video Feed feature?

Identify linkedin's mission and current goals
Evaluate the pros and cons of the two options and build a hypothesis
If needed, design an A/B test and find some metrics to prove/disprove the hypothesis
Review the results and make a decision

Linkedin’s Mission - empower professional connections

Identify a Goal - acquisition & activation, engagement and retention,

Pros and cons of the two available options

B2C customer feed

	Add video to the feed	Not add video to the feed
Pros	Richer content, more engagement Parity with the competition Cross sell synergies from products like linkedin learning
Cons	Video content can be more casual and may not match with brand Cannibalization of linkedin learning

Hypothesis: Adding video content to my feed will help increase user engagement without negatively impacting other products in my portfolio or my brand image

Metrics to approve/disprove the hypothesis

Engagement
- # of logins per user per week (people come more often)
- Weighted average engagement per user per day (views , likes, comments, shares)
- Average time spent on the platform per day

I will use a weighted average engagement which includes time spent

Time spent - 1 pt for every x minute
Like - 1 pt
Comment - 2 pt
Share - 2 pt

Impact on Brand
- NPS score
- Subjective feedback from users
Impact on other products in portfolio
- Total time spent on linkedin learning
- Weighted engagement on recruitment product (# of positive responses etc)
- There can be cannibalization within the same product. So I will also like to measure the impact on content contribution
  - # of users contributing content to linkedin.

Using this I will like to set up an A/B test. I would like to test different types of video contents and different size and duration

Type of videos

Would restrict the initial launch to videos created for business / professional reasons. These could be across the two categories

Professionally created
UGC

Duration

Snippets < 10 seconds
Short videos - upto 2 minutes
Long videos- upto 10 minutes (can go longer if average spend time is more than 10 minutes)

Summary - We were evaluating the option of adding videos to the linked in feed We decided to focus on B2C - normal feed.

Further, we identified some pros including its impact on engagement and parity with competition. We also talked about some cons like cannibalization and brand impact

Using, average engagement, NPS and cannibalization as our metric we designed a A/B experiment with different type of videos and different duration

Aman Gupta · Answer 2 · 2020-04-22T08:28:30+0000

Clarifying questions:

Video feed feature you mean regarding you can post/watch a video separately on your feed. I am assuming you are asking for a separate feed for users, especially for videos.

Is there any special motive behind this? Do we want to engage our users through videos?

Company: Linkedin is a platform to connect professionals.

Linkedin mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Video feature totally depends on:

We will build strategies based on Metrics.

Do we have any metrics regarding

No. of views on video/day >=25% of Linkedin content views/day
No. of a video posted/day>=25% of content posted on Linkedin/day
No of engagement on video/user/day>= 25% of engagement happen currently on Linkedin content/user/day
Time spent on video/user/day>= 25 % of time spent on Linkedin content/user/day.

Evaluation criteria

Give a score to each equation if that statement is true to give 1 or else 0.

If you got a score of 4, you can directly start to build and thought regarding creating video feed you can go for building the feature completely with launch it for alpha testing & beta testing
If you got a score of 3, you can work on creating firstly a prototype.
If you got a score of 2, you will have to check on more metrics and interaction with users before thinking about building the feature.
If you gotta score of 0 or 1, then may it's not something worthy of to make this kind of feature currently but you can keep a watch on and can see to make it in future.

Recommendation

As suggested strategies we are comparing with metrics, In the end, we will decide regarding whether we have to build Video feed or not by taking the help of metrics and suggest the next step for it with evaluation criteria.