Treat this as archived info.
On 26 June 2023, LinkedIn turned off new profile video uploads. See my LinkedIn post about it when the news broke 10 days before.
This renders the information below as mostly academic, though you can still view profile videos that were uploaded before the cutoff date.
My hope is that LinkedIn will see how powerful profile videos can be to humanise LinkedIn profiles and hence to reactivate them for new uploads.
Profile video (formerly cover story) is the up-to-30-second video that sits behind your profile photo. This was intended to allow you to add some personality to your profile.
This was originally going to be part of the creator mode “package” but LinkedIn separated it so that you could have one without the other.
If you see a blue-purple ring around a person’s profile photo, they’ve recorded a profile video (up to 30 seconds). Click their photo to watch the video.
The blue-purple ring around the profile photo appears when you haven’t watched the person’s profile video. After the first watch, the ring turns grey.
If you have autoplay enabled in your Settings & Privacy panel, the first 3 seconds of the profile video will play automatically on mute when you visit the profile of someone who’s uploaded a video.
When autoplay is off, there’s no profile video preview, but clicking the profile photo does lead to the video playing.
Profile videos could be added only via the mobile app but they can be viewed (and deleted) on the desktop version of LinkedIn.
Portrait (9:16) format was the best choice for profile videos.
Examples of good profile videos.
In no particular order, here are some good profile videos that have been recorded in portrait mode. Some of these get extra brownie points for including captions:
In September 2021, LinkedIn added the ability to upload SRT closed captions (CC) to profile videos. Here’s a quick explainer:
Annoyingly, automatic captions have never been supported on profile videos.
Even though you can no longer upload a profile video, the feature to upload SRT files remains; however, I don’t think captions added after the 26 June 2023 cutoff actually display properly. LinkedIn are unlikely to fix this given that the service has been decommissioned.
How I handled the demise of profile video.
LinkedIn said that existing profile videos would continue to be viewable after the 26 June 2023 cutoff date, but we can’t be certain that this will mean those videos will be available indefinitely.
To protect the visibility of my profile video, I created a normal LinkedIn video post that shows the profile video, and I then placed that video into the Featured section of my profile.
I’ve referred to this as my time capsule video, as it’s now unchangeable on my LinkedIn profile and could potentially be there for years.
To see some of my videos that aren’t frozen in time, check out my @espirian YouTube channel.
