LinkedIn, the social network that now boasts 740 million users worldwide, has created for itself a niche as the place online where professionals go to add listings for their places of work, get headhunted for other work, and look for work. For years, though, it's been looking for ways to more thoroughly exploit that position in order to move into a whole slew of adjacent areas including training and education, professional development, networking with others, and news. Today the company rolled out a series of new features that it will introduce over the coming months in a bid to play to that strategy, and perhaps, but by no means assuredly, increase engagement on the platform.

- More video is coming to people's profiles, as it launches a "video Cover Story," short videos that people can make talking about themselves to live on their home pages. To help people feel more connected with how they are being depicted on LinkedIn, the company is also adding a pronoun feature.

With these, the company is launching a new, officially titled "Creator" mode, a more refined but also more democratic variant of the Influencer network. Any one can be a Creator if they so choose, for starters. It's also carving out more of a solid place for freelancers on the platform, by way of a new Service page attached to your profile.

— Some boost is also being given to LinkedIn's educational and training efforts. That program was originally launched in June 2020 in the wake of the economic shift that Covid-19 brought on the world with Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, to offer free online training in 10 different professional areas. Now that program is getting extended to the end of this year. As the companies surpassed 30 million people in 249 countries using the training service, the companies hope that the numbers of companies hiring through the program will rise up to 250,000.

In another teaming with Microsoft, LinkedIn is also announcing a new Teams-based app called Career Coach aimed at students that use Teams. Using AI tools from LinkedIn, the Career Coach helps its users identify what they are interested in and might like to pursue as a profession, and it uses links through to LinkedIn and Microsoft's learning content that could help with that journey.

Taken as a whole, this otherwise disparate set of announcements all lean into an interesting development for LinkedIn. Social media-whether you are the person posting content or merely reading posts from others which you feel speak to your situation in life-has a strong undercurrent of individual empowerment throughout it. Through all these features and products, LinkedIn's trying in its own way to bring some of that individual identity, voice, and self-advancement, through to its own platform.

Here are some more detailed thoughts about the various new areas:.
Video-based Cover Story plays on the idea of how people create short videos about themselves, which they would then perhaps use to post as a status on a more consumer-focused social media platform. If that list of places where you work and have worked or studied tells one kind of story about who you are, the video selfie can tell another to fill in more gaps.

As LinkedIn's chief product officer Tomer Cohen describes it, you can use the space to give yourself a more human angle, describing something about your interests or aspirations that might not come across in your resume. These also auto-play when people visit your profile, which Cohen aptly refers to as a "Harry Potter" effect, in reference to the animated Daily Prophet newspaper in the wizarding world. For now, these will only appear in your profile, but over time the animated pictures may also be expanded to search results.

It all sounds very interesting except that it relies quite a lot on people using the format successfully rather than creating something that might actually deter recruiters.

Ironically, however, if the trend is to reduce some of what might profile and pigeonhole people too much when job-hunting, adding in these videos could have the effect of bringing some of that kind of judgment back into play. Ultimately, though, it will depend on how they come to be adopted and used and viewed.

The intent of LinkedIn on video comes as part of the greater company engagement with the medium over the last several years with, for example, adding services like Live broadcasts into the timeline. Not a surprise considering just how sticky video has been in the bigger realm of social media across services like TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter.

It also appears to be playing out at LinkedIn and areas that more closely align with the business of the company: in a survey it conducted, LinkedIn said, some 61% of job seekers said that recorded video could be the next iteration of the traditional cover letter, and that among hiring managers, nearly 80% say video figures strongly in their candidate vetting. So it's not about testing the waters but perhaps making sure you have the tools to stay afloat.

Video is playing a more important role beyond just aiding everyone with profiles. For the most proactive, LinkedIn is launching a Creator mode, where people who already make LinkedIn Live videos and other content can shift over their profiles to become Creators, rather than regular LinkedIn citizens. This is something you control yourselves, not like the Influencer tag, which LinkedIn awards to a smaller group of thought leaders, and it means you can be "followed" on LinkedIn so people watch and stay current with what you post.

Perhaps it's impossible to imagine who would actually come to LinkedIn for entertainment in the same way that one might come to Instagram to watch a creator, but the dream is when creating content on LinkedIn becomes an end in itself for both people watching and for the person being watched.

Apparently, it represents the organic evolution of what really constitutes the original content LinkedIn has been creating through its editorial operation led by Dan Roth - indeed the company announced the first steps for its Creator product last month, led by Roth. But unlike creators on platforms like Instagram or YouTube or TikTok, for now it doesn't look like there are direct routes to monetization when you are a LinkedIn Creator. That might change, however.

"Indirectly we've been connecting people to opportunities since we first enabled people to share content on LinkedIn.  Our members get leads and grow their business and following on LinkedIn," said Keren Baruch, group product manager for LinkedIn's creator strategy. She mentioned Quentin Allums who was "jobless, broke, and desperate when he started posting LinkedIn videos. Then they started to go viral and he created his own business on LinkedIn from this success".

"As we continue listening to member feedback as we think about future opportunities, we'll also continue to evolve how we create more value for our creators," she added.

The Service Pages appear to be part of a product and project LinkedIn started planting seeds for in February - one that will include a fuller freelancer marketplace, by September.

But what's important is that this does look like a baby step: no links through to setting up payments or handling anything like that, and LinkedIn itself isn't making a cut as Fiverr or Freelancer.com might by giving people the platform to generate business for themselves. For now, it could just be a way of testing the waters and getting some people to populate the site with credentials but further down the line may well represent an interesting inroad into a new kind of advertising unit or payment services alongside revenue-generating features that LinkedIn already has in the form of premium subscriptions, tools for recruiters and other kinds of advertising.

Last but not the least, since LinkedIn has done so much in trying to democratize access to opportunity on the platform, providing a link for freelancers to post on its platform may even interestingly open the door to more than the knowledge workers and their skills. These currently represent the most significant proportion of LinkedIn's users but certainly are not the sum total of the working world that the company looks to reach and serve in the longer term.