If your business wants to reach individuals with buying power, LinkedIn video is what you should be working with. As opposed to Facebook video and YouTube, LinkedIn tends to have a more mature audience which is more business-oriented, and which also has considerably more buying power than typical viewers of YouTube or Facebook videos. It is estimated that approximately 45% of all B2B buyers make some type of purchasing decisions after having viewed LinkedIn content. So if you happen to be a B2B marketer, you should definitely be operating on LinkedIn, where you’ll have a terrific chance of reaching people who are heavily involved in sales and sales decisions.
LinkedIn users tend to be of several different types, the first of which is the user who checks in once every three or four weeks to find messages or updates. Another group of LinkedIn users are more active than that, creating and consuming content regularly on the platform. The content they consume is generally from independent creators, or about major news stories which are trending and have been picked up by the LinkedIn editors, then posted for the use of account-holders.
There’s also a group of LinkedIn users which are in the process of migrating from Facebook or other platforms. This group of people includes marketers and creators who recognize that LinkedIn is a platform which has outstanding organic reach, as opposed to Facebook where you will generally have to pay for any kind of extensive reach. Here’s how you can get started with creating your first LinkedIn video, so you can take advantage of the platform’s natural organic reach to enhance your business’s reputation and its goals.
Your First LinkedIn Video
While you could use a video which has been prepared for YouTube or Facebook, you’re better off starting from scratch, because videos created for other environments tend not to translate well on LinkedIn. Users are not prepared for the polished kind of multi-subject content which appears on YouTube, and since LinkedIn is in its early stages of video presentation, you’re better off making a fairly simple video, so that your audience can quickly understand the takeaway from it.
If you’re just getting started with LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to limit your first video, and probably several videos after that, to no more than one minute of content, and to focus on a single subject which has relevance and value to your intended audience. Using this approach, your videos will be much easier to understand, and your audience will pick up on the intended takeaway. Enforcing the one-minute time limit will ensure that your message is compact and focused. Before you start preparing the video itself, you should jot down bullet points about what you want to say during the video, to make sure that it’s clean and crisp.
Keep in mind that creating videos of 5 or 10 minute’s duration will probably be fine for Facebook or YouTube, because users are much more used to seeing longer running videos on those platforms. However, businessmen are not generally willing to invest 10 minutes of their time to acquire a single viewpoint about some aspect of business, and this is another reason why the one-minute time limit is essential. It’s also a very good idea to add captions at critical points during your video, because chances are that most viewers will have the sound turned off, and they’ll miss the point of your video if you don’t have visual cues. There are some apps available which can help you add these captions, for instance Clipomatic, or Clips by Apple.
Optimizing LinkedIn Video
To take advantage of all the benefits and features offered by LinkedIn, you’ll want to optimize your LinkedIn video, especially with regard to video length, thumbnail images, and the text which appears in the feed above your video. Since LinkedIn doesn’t currently allow you to choose a thumbnail image, your best bet is to edit the first second or two of your video to show the image which you would prefer to appear as your video thumbnail.
This is probably more important than it sounds, because if you’re a marketer who is trying to gain brand recognition, you’ll want your followers to understand at a glance what the video is all about. A good starter screen will help in this regard, so make sure that you don’t have any weird images or goofy faces in the first second of your video. You should definitely not start your LinkedIn video with a black screen, because it won’t look good in your news feed, and it won’t attract much attention from viewers who only see a thumbnail image of a black screen.
The length of your videos should definitely start at one minute in the beginning, because you want to provide your viewers with something that they will finish watching, and if you are a new content creator, most users will not invest more than a minute to see your creation. Once you’ve built your audience somewhat, you can begin lengthening your videos to two or three minutes, and if you’re successful at establishing a good following of users, you may eventually even be able to extend that out to 3 to 5 minute videos.
The LinkedIn algorithm governs who gets to see your videos and at present, that means that more of your connections will see your videos than anyone from Pages. LinkedIn’s algorithm is much more slanted toward connections then it is about the format of your content. Text which accompanies your video can be shown in many different ways, and these are constantly changing. At the moment, you will generally see two lines of text above your video, with three dots that can be clicked on for those who want to see more.
The text over the feed is completely expanded, so your best bet is to write the first several lines of copy as though they are the only thing people will see, but make sure that the rest of your copy is of equally high quality. It’s probably a good practice to only tag people who appear in the video and no one else, although no more than five tags should ever be used. By over-tagging users in an attempt to get more visibility for your video, your post will take on the appearance of spam, and you may lose followers instead of gain them.
If you follow these recommendations about creating your first LinkedIn videos, you should gain a decent following if your content has high-value. Once you’ve acquired a modest following, you can get a little more creative with your videos and expand the content, so that you can reach more followers and include more information.
