What is the best way to promote video on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million users worldwide. As a professional social media platform, LinkedIn offers great opportunities for businesses and marketers to connect with their target audience and promote their brand. Video content is one of the most effective types of content on LinkedIn that can help businesses increase engagement, build trust and authority, and ultimately drive conversions.

According to LinkedIn, video posts see up to 50% more organic engagement than regular posts. Additionally, video is shared 20 times more than any other type of content. With such compelling stats, it’s clear that video marketing should be an essential component of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

But like any other platform, there are right and wrong ways to go about video marketing on LinkedIn. The goal should be to create relevant, insightful and engaging video content that provides value to your viewers. To help you nail your LinkedIn video marketing and promotion strategy, here are some best practices you should follow.

1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Page for Video

The first step is to optimize your LinkedIn Page itself for video hosting and sharing. You want to make sure your LinkedIn Page is ready to accommodate video content before you start publishing videos.

Here are a few tips to optimize your Page:

• Add a strong video cover image that will catch viewers’ attention and convey what your brand is about.
• Make sure your profile picture and background photo are high quality and professional.
• Include relevant keywords in your headline, description and ‘about’ section.
• Link to your website and other social profiles so viewers can explore your brand further.
• Check your analytics to identify followers’ demographics, location, and industry to create targeted video content.

2. Create Different Types of Videos

LinkedIn supports several different video formats and types that you can leverage for your brand.

Some top types of video to create include:

• Product or service demo videos: Showcase your offering and highlight key features and benefits.
• Thought leadership videos: Share your expertise, insights and thought leadership content.
• Company culture videos: Give a behind-the-scenes look at your brand’s personality and work culture.
• Customer testimonial videos: Build trust and credibility by featuring client reviews.
• Behind-the-scenes videos: Provide a peek into your everyday operations and humanize your brand.
• Explainer and how-to videos: Teach and add value for your audience with step-by-step tutorials.

Diversifying your video content will help you appeal to wider audiences with different interests and needs.

3. Keep Videos Short and Impactful

Don’t make the mistake of creating long, drawn-out videos just to increase watch time. LinkedIn reports that the ideal video length is less than 3 minutes long. Anything longer than that sees a significant drop-off in viewer retention.

Strive to deliver your message and value in a concise, compelling way within a short runtime. Some tips to create short but high-quality videos include:

• Keep introductory and ending segments brief.
• Use concise language – don’t ramble.
• Leverage graphics, b-roll footage and text overlays instead of relying solely on talking heads.
• Write a tight script that covers just one to three key topic points.
• During editing, be ruthless in cutting any unnecessary or repetitive clips.

4. Make Video Content Shareable

One of the goals of your LinkedIn video marketing should be to create content that viewers want to share across their own networks. This helps expand your reach and visibility exponentially.

Some characteristics of highly shareable videos include:

• Emotional appeal – evoke emotions like happiness, motivation or humor.
• Controversial or counterintuitive ideas that spark debate and comments.
• Actionable advice or takeaways that provide value to the viewer.
• Impressive statistics, data points and facts presented visually.
• A compelling or provocative title and thumbnail image.

Leveraging these elements will inspire viewers to share your video with their connections on LinkedIn.

5. Utilize LinkedIn’s Built-In Video Tools

Take advantage of LinkedIn’s own video features and settings to maximize the impact of your videos. Some options to leverage include:

• LinkedIn Video Ads: Run video ads to reach a targeted audience beyond just your followers.
• Sponsored Video: Sponsor video posts to ensure wider viewership for important videos.
• Pre-roll ads: Attach a short commercial to the start of your organic videos.
• Video captions: Add captions to enhance accessibility and viewability without sound.
• Interactive video: Insert interactive elements like quizzes, CTAs and cards to boost engagement.

Familiarize yourself with all of LinkedIn’s built-in video features to make the most of the platform’s capabilities.

6. Promote Your Videos

Simply uploading a video to LinkedIn isn’t enough – you need to actually promote your videos as well. Use a diverse range of organic and paid tactics to get your videos in front of the right audiences.

Some smart ways to promote LinkedIn videos include:

• Share video links in relevant LinkedIn Groups with strong member bases.
• Promote videos through employee accounts to expand reach.
• Run sponsored video and Sponsored Content ads.
• Embed videos on your website and blog posts.
• Share video links and clips on other social platforms like Twitter.
• Repurpose video clips into different formats like GIFs and carousels.
• Promote through email marketing and outreach campaigns.

Combine organic and paid distribution strategies for maximum video promotion power.

7. Track Performance and Optimize

Monitoring your video performance and analytics is crucial for understanding what content resonates with your audience and what could be improved. Some key metrics to track include:

• Video views
• Average watch time
• Audience retention graph
• Likes, comments, shares
• Clickthrough rate
• Conversions generated

Use these insights to identify your best-performing video types and topics so you can refine your future video strategy.

Here is an example data table visualizing hypothetical LinkedIn video performance metrics:

Analyzing metrics in this way makes it easy to spot trends and opportunities.

8. Foster Video Engagement

Merely racking up video views isn’t enough – you want people to actually engage with your videos. This leads to more shares, comments, and overall visibility for your brand.

Some tips to improve video engagement include:

• Ask questions in the video or description to spark discussion.
• Respond to any comments and @mention engaged viewers.
• Run LinkedIn polls linked to your video posts.
• Include links to related content within your videos.
• Leverage interactive video elements like end screens and cards.

The more engaging your videos are, the more the LinkedIn algorithm will show them to wider audiences.

Conclusion

Following these best practices for optimizing, distributing and tracking your LinkedIn video marketing will help maximize your reach and results.

The most important takeaways are:

• Optimize your LinkedIn presence for video.
• Produce a diverse range of video types – demos, testimonials, how-tos, etc.
• Keep videos concise, impactful and shareable.
• Leverage LinkedIn’s built-in video features.
• Promote videos through both organic and paid strategies.
• Analyze performance data to refine your approach.
• Encourage active engagement from your viewers.

By following these best practices, your brand can realize the immense power of LinkedIn video marketing for fueling awareness, engagement and conversions.