How Your Business Can Make Use of LinkedIn Video

Though LinkedIn began as a platform focused on connecting professionals and businesses, it has since evolved to fit other roles. One such role is as a viable platform for video marketing, with LinkedIn video marketers flocking to the platform year after year. This is due to LinkedIn’s implementation of native video in 2017, a feature that took the platform from business connections and long-form content and into something much more versatile.

It’s no surprise that a larger focus on video content has caused more interest in LinkedIn. Video is a core part of modern life, both professionally and personally, and there’s no better demonstration of this popularity than the dizzying success of video marketing as a strategy.

Where video marketing was once a novel strategy, it now reigns supreme as the most effective marketing tool bar none. With a clear demand and equally clear rate of success, you need to be making use of video marketing.

As LinkedIn video is quickly growing in popularity, it is an excellent place to start your video marketing journey, and reap some benefits unique to that platform. If you need a final push to convince you of the efficacy of LinkedIn video, look no further.

LinkedIn video types

LinkedIn video has a few options for what content you can create and upload. For newcomers to video marketing, it’s easy to get lost in the number of options available to you. Here’s an overview of what tools you have available on LinkedIn video:

Native video

LinkedIn offers native video support. This enables users to directly upload videos to the platform, rather than have them uploaded elsewhere and shared on your account. The main upside to doing so is that native videos are played automatically, which works wonders for engagement. Videos with autoplay are much more likely to be watched, interacted with, and shared, bringing more attention to your platform.

LinkedIn video ad campaigns

Another excellent tool offered by LinkedIn is video ad campaigns. These campaigns allow businesses to get their brands in front of a large audience, with a range of options to hone in on a target niche. This can provide a massive boost to brand awareness, bringing a great degree of attention to a brand that might take a long time to draw organically.

Embedded videos

Embedded videos are videos shared on one particular platform, though hosted on another, such as YouTube. As we mentioned, LinkedIn video has native support, something much more effective than embedded videos. However, if you have a catalog of videos hosted elsewhere, you may find it more straightforward to embed them.

What you can do with LinkedIn video

LinkedIn video puts several tools at your disposal, but it can be tough to decide exactly how to use them. Here are a few suggestions of what you could do:

Promotional Linkedin video content

Promotional content is exactly what you’d expect – videos that aim to promote your products, services, or a particular concept. There are many ways you could do this, from instructional videos to keeping your audience up-to-date with what is happening behind the scenes. As long as your content builds anticipation for something upcoming, it will likely succeed as a promotional video.

The benefits of this type of content are twofold – building excitement and brand awareness. An excited audience will talk about the object of their interest, boosting its reach and creating a continuous buildup of interest. Once your product or service releases, an excited audience is likely to jump at the prospect, earning you a quick return on your investment.

Storytelling

Broadly speaking, video is the perfect medium for telling stories. This is due to it being an inherently engaging medium, one that allows for a near limitless amount of creativity and emotion to be added. But why should storytelling be included in your marketing campaigns?

Put simply, it’s incredibly effective. People like to learn, and they like a good story. Put the two together, and you have the ideal method of educating an audience on any topic of your choosing. Your story could be about a product, your business’s work, or even an insight into why you do what you do. Whatever you choose, you’re sure to garner some interest with a good story.

As LinkedIn views video content favourably, your video stories are a bit more likely to be blessed by the algorithm, gaining a bit more traction than they might otherwise. This, coupled with the engaging nature of story content, could see your LinkedIn presence receive a quick boost in viewership.

Vlogs

As LinkedIn has its roots in connecting professionals with one another, it is the perfect platform for vlogs, or video blogs. In vlogs, creators will express something about themselves in each video. This could be an opinion, an activity, or just a topic they wanted to discuss. Given the personal nature of a vlog, they are perfect for building a personal brand, making it far easier to get connected with people that share the same vision as you.

Tips for using LinkedIn video

Now you have a few ideas on what you can do with LinkedIn video, let’s talk about how you can optimise your content creation process. You don’t want to put a great deal of effort into a video, only for it to flop because of poor planning or optimisation.

Less is more

In the video content world, the general rule is the shorter the video, the better. People’s attention spans are all but non-existent, and with a veritable ocean of content available, you need to hook your viewers quickly. Make sure your video is all wheat and no chaff, with a particular emphasis on placing the most interesting parts of your video at the start. You’ll also need to keep your video within a certain time constraint, though that depends on the type of video you’re creating. The average length of a video is around 3 minutes, though for instructional videos, as an example, you can go to around 20 minutes. Take note that LinkedIn video has a max of 10 minutes, however.

Build links

Link-building is key to drawing attention to your content, whatever it is. You could make the best video on the platform, but if nobody knows it exists, it might as well not. To avoid your videos being lost in the content abyss, take care to build links wherever you can. Linking to your content on other parts of the platform is a good idea. But, you should also consider building links on external platforms too. Embedding links to your content in emails is another great idea. In doing so, you can increase the amount of attention your content gets, and as a result, improve brand awareness.

Optimise for mobile devices

These days, practically everyone online uses a mobile device in some form. People aren’t stuck to their desktops anymore, and instead, use phones and tablets to swipe through their social media apps. For several social media platforms, the majority of their audience uses a mobile device, and LinkedIn is one of them. As such, getting your content optimised is a must.

First, you should ensure your videos are of high quality. Next, you’ll need to choose an aspect ratio that suits mobile devices. 1:2.4 to 2.4:1 is a good range to aim for. Lastly, you should consider your file size. LinkedIn video is capped at 5GB, but you should aim quite a bit lower. The smaller your file size, the quicker it will load, and the less strain it will place on your viewers’ devices. If your content doesn’t load quickly, you can’t expect your audience to stick around. Once you’ve gone through the optimisation process, all that’s left is to check it out on your own mobile device, then hit publish.

Wrapping up

There are many ways to use LinkedIn video, and equally many benefits offered by the platform. Considering the steady increase in the use of LinkedIn video, and the platform in general, now is the perfect time to hop on and start building your presence. Who knows, you could be one of the platform’s next influencers.