LinkedIn Video Advertising
It may not be as well-known in the social networking world as bigger brands such as Twitter and Facebook, but LinkedIn has carved out a successful niche for its product, which is designed to link together business contacts, customers, suppliers and colleagues rather than your friends and family. All social networking websites carry advertising, and as all are free to join and use, showing adverts to their users is their main income stream. A recent announcement of an improved advertising package with You Tube links will make it even easier for brands to promote themselves using LinkedIn.
Current Advertising
LinkedIn Ads, the site’s current advertising platform, has been slower to grab the opportunities for additional revenue than competitors such as Facebook. Currently, advertisers can only show text or static images to LinkedIn users, and this have obvious limitations to how effective the advertising can be.
Video Advertising
By using the new LinkedIn application, advertisers will now be able to embed their own You Tube videos onto the LinkedIn pages. The size of the video once clicked will be 300 x 240, and can last for up to 30 seconds. Companies who have their own videos can upload them directly to the LinkedIn site, or use ones which already exist on their You Tube account. Once the video has played, users can click through to the company’s website to see more about the products and services they have just seen advertised.
Budget
One of the major benefits for companies choosing to use this new advertising platform is that they are able to set a very strict budget for their advertising campaign, and the software makes it very easy to stick to the budget. The videos are shown on a pay per click basis, and the campaign can be paused or halted at any time. Marketing departments therefore can easily monitor the effectiveness of any given campaign and instantly update or change their strategy without having to spend large additional sums.
Other changes
In conjunction with the changes announced by LinkedIn regarding the video advertising, the site has also recently redesigned their user profiles to try to attract new users to the site and ensure that existing users continue to improve their experiences with the site. The redesigned site allows users to change the appearance of their profile more easily, and connect with other users. The redesign is also targeted at advertisers and marketers, as it may make it more easy for advertising to be targeted effectively.