LinkedIn Messaging Gets Long Overdue Revamp, Adding GIFs, Emojis And Stickers

If you’re anything like me or most people I know, you almost certainly have a profile on LinkedIn but you probably never (ever ever) use its messaging service. Well, LinkedIn hopes that by adding stickers, GIFs and other such things you might change your mind.

The company is rolling out a newly designed, chat-like messaging interface from Tuesday that, on paper at least, brings some of the popular components of messaging apps into play. The new interface is cleaner — on both mobile and desktop — and now LinkedIn will let you attach photos and documents, as well as the aforementioned stickers, emojis and GIFs.

Ultimately though it remains to be seen whether it was the design — which was admittedly pretty stale — that was the problem with LinkedIn messages. Email, messaging apps and, for work, now services like Slack are the established channels through which most people communicate, and the latter, in particular, could pose a threat to LinkedIn if they expand into its core areas of business.

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Perhaps cognizant of that issue, LinkedIn hinted that it has a lot of other messaging-related features in the pipeline:

We’re hard at work to explore the possibilities of how we will extend this experience. We’re excited about concepts like intelligent messaging assistants that can help suggest people you should message or provide you with relevant information about that person before you start a conversation. Or the possibilities with voice and video to make conversations more compelling.

We know we can put a unique LinkedIn spin on the kinds of conversations you are already having in a professional setting, like making introductions or debriefing after a meeting. The possibilities are endless and we look forward to continue iterating and enhancing the experience.

We’ll have to wait to see what that means exactly.

These changes are hitting iOS, Android and Web for LinkedIn’s English-speaking users first, the rest of the userbase will follow in the coming weeks, the company said.