Tech: LinkedIn video sharing could be a revelation (LNKD)

LinkedIn has rolled out a way to natively upload videos onto the social network through its mobile app

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LinkedIn has rolled out a way to natively upload videos onto the social network through its mobile app, Marketing Land reports.

Users can take and upload videos with LinkedIn’s updated in-app camera, or upload clips from their phone’s camera roll. The sharing and in-feed video feature is now being tested in the US with a small batch of users and plans to bring it worldwide in the coming months.

Creators will have insights into viewership analytics, including one special business-oriented insight. On top of the standard suite of views, likes, and shares a video has received, LinkedIn is giving added details about particular people who have viewed a video, including information on where they work and their job titles. These job-related insights won’t be given for all viewers, just a selection of the top ones.

These videos can last up to 10 minutes, but LinkedIn recommends a range of 30 seconds and five minutes. As with LinkedIn’s pre-existing in-feed videos, user-uploaded clips will play automatically with sound off, though it's possible to display auto-play videos in account settings. LinkedIn counts a video view after three seconds of play time, like Facebook.

Introducing user-uploaded video sharing, with special analytics and an emphasis on short-form content, could prove to be a revelation for LinkedIn for a few reasons:

• Networking and sales. The analytics around user-uploaded videos, particularly about where viewers work and what they do, presents substantial opportunities for networking, recruiting, generating sales leads, and so on. For example, executives or thought leaders could post a video about a new product or important new trend in their sector, and then dive into their audience analytics to build up a list of prospects; job-seekers could post videos with an eye on catching a recruiter or company’s attention, and vice versa. All of this ultimately presents an opportunity for LinkedIn to upsell free members to premium tiers, where more advanced CRM tools are provided.
• Media distribution. Influencers and publishers can use the new video-sharing option to distribute content directly on LinkedIn and grow their audiences. This is especially pertinent to creators and media companies with a business focus, who receive a considerable amount of traffic from the platform. Previously, they would share clips on LinkedIn by embedding YouTube videos — a slightly circuitous route. Aside from removing friction in this process, LinkedIn’s video-sharing feature also wrestles a degree of influence away from rival sites. In the future, LinkedIn’s may look towards nurturing a network of industry influencers, akin to YouTube’s slate of homegrown stars.
• User engagement. Retention and time spent are problematic for LinkedIn. It has over 500 million members, but only a fraction of them (23% in Q3 2016) use the platform on a monthly basis, and they average just two minutes a day on-site (compared with 30 minutes and 50 minutes a day by Snapchat and Facebook users, respectively). Video has exploded on social sites like Facebook and Snapchat, and could help LinkedIn similarly to capture user attention, keep them on the platform for longer, and coming back for more later on. For creators, the opportunity to build a professional brand and network through videos is a compelling reason to post and stay on the platform too.
• Video ad revenue. LinkedIn doesn’t currently serve video ads on its platform, according to a spokesperson cited in Marketing Land, although it used to in 2012 across YouTube videos through a revenue-share agreement. But it seems inevitable that LinkedIn will eventually, and probably soon, start serving video ads again. The video-sharing feature is a big step by LinkedIn to become more video-centric, and once its platform is populated with videos, it could easily tweak its algorithms to surface more of this content in the feed, like Facebook has done. If and when this happens, LinkedIn should be in a strong position to attract video ad budgets from brands across industries.

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