Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn, speaks at a LinkedIn event in San Francisco on September 22, 2016.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Influencer marketing has become big business on TikTok and Instagram, where popular creators can make good money helping brands promote their content. Now, LinkedIn wants in on the game.
As of last week, LinkedIn is allowing advertisers to pay to boost posts from users, including those with large followings. Its product, called Thought Leader ads, launched in limited capacity last year.
The MicrosoftThe privately held company is looking for a shake-up as LinkedIn’s revenue growth is stuck in the single digits through 2022. The company is turning to its members, which topped 1 billion in November, to help expand.
Influencer marketing to date is largely a consumer phenomenon, where gimmicks and gimmicks can turn internet-savvy creators into celebrities with millions of followers. Nearly two-thirds of US social media marketing dollars this year will flow to parent Instagram After and Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance, with Instagram and TikTok together gaining 2 percentage points of additional share by 2026, according to eMarketer estimates.
LinkedIn, which launched a year before Facebook, will gain just 4% of the market, equal to $4.5 billion in marketing revenue, eMarketer says, and its share will remain flat over the next two years.
“It takes a long time for ads and ad formats to really take root,” said Max Willens, senior analyst at eMarketer, referring to LinkedIn’s latest effort.
LinkedIn was introduced Thought Leader ads last year but with limited use. Brands could only boost posts from their own employees. MasterCardfor example, it promoted posts written by some of its leaders in Singapore, with one taking over 500 notifications the first day. LinkedIn itself has used Thought Leaders ads for some posts from chief operating officer Dan Shapero, but not yet for CEO Ryan Roslansky.
By opening Thought Leader Ads, LinkedIn allows anyone to boost a post as long as the author grants permission. Social media marketer Brendan Gahan is so positive about the format that he focuses much of his efforts on helping companies use Thought Leader ads.
“In an era where brand safety is a big issue, LinkedIn has the upper hand, particularly as opposed to Twitter,” said Gahan, who last year founded an agency called Creator Authority, referring to the social networking platform. now known as X.
X lost some leaders working on brand safety last year, just as the Elon Musk-owned platform was seeing an explosion in hate speech on the app.
LinkedIn has long been an effective site for advertisers because members list their employment information, making it easier for brands to target ads to relevant audiences. Advertising is geared towards business-focused products such as computer software and infrastructure, although car manufacturers, universities and banks also use the network to reach potential customers.
“If you want to sell a high-quality B2B product and you know the buying team is a CFO and someone in finance and like someone in HR, we can literally put ads in front of those specific people on LinkedIn because the first-party data is so strong,” said Roslansky he said at a conference in late 2022.
Thought Leader ads came about after employees saw marketing clients promoting screenshots of other users’ content. Since launching last fall, the ads have generated higher engagement than regular image ads, said Abhishek Shrivastava, LinkedIn’s vice president of product management.
“Humanizing your brand is critical for B2B and has been underutilized in this space,” Shrivastava said, adding that clients are very excited about it.
It may not be cheap. It generally costs more to rack up a thousand ad impressions on LinkedIn than on Instagram or TikTok, in part because the company charges more for advertisers to reach its more affluent user base. Shrivastava said that instead of comparing costs with other sites, brands will look at the sales and business leads they get from running ads.
For months, project management software startup ClickUp has been paying to promote LinkedIn posts from its own executives. Chris Cunningham, the company’s head of social marketing, said traditional LinkedIn ads can sometimes be repetitive and generic, and he’s eager to see how promoted posts perform when influencers are involved.
On other social networks, ClickUp has had more success promoting posts from creators than standard ads, Cunningham said. Plus, he said, “it’s super easy.”
Betsy Hindman, a marketer in Tennessee who helps companies make the most of their LinkedIn presence, said a brand ambassador with an audience can have more impact than a standard ad.
“It’s part of a complete end-to-end strategy that includes warming people up along the way with whatever kind of content they’re responding to,” he said.
Building a list of creators will likely take time. Some influencers are represented by agencies, and LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager advertising system does not have an automatic process for connecting media buyers with agencies.
“This is a direction we are exploring,” Shrivastava said.
More data will soon be available to advertisers. In a few weeks, LinkedIn members will be able to search any company’s ad collection and see Thought Leader ads, a spokesperson said. This could help advertisers see what works best.
One potential boon for LinkedIn lies in TikTok’s fate. The app faces a possible ban in the US after the House of Representatives passed legislation last month that would have forced ByteDance to sell it within six months. The momentum has since slowed, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., he urged lawmakers to take action on the issue earlier this week.
eMarketer’s Willens said the agencies are monitoring the matter, but said “no one feels there is an imminent threat.”