Absence of Video Streaming Feature Affects LinkedIn Rating

© 2017 March Oyinki

The digital marketing industry has witnessed rapid transformation in the last couple of years, especially in media content curatives. We are beginning to see increasing use of video and GIF animated contents, especially in the social media than regular illustrations, photographs and graphic images on adverts.

Digital marketers are people looking for return on investment and rarely do they have the luxury of time to experiment with marketing channels that are less productive. Study by Social Media Examiner has shown that 88% of marketers want to know how to measure their return on investment for social media activities.

Marketers take decisions aptly and give no room for failure in their marketing strategy, so for digital marketing channel that cannot deliver, they are simply dropped from mix. Right until the last quarter of 2016, illustrations, photographs and graphic images were still very much in use, but at the end of the year, that trend changed and digital marketers started focusing on digital media curatives which produces increased conversion.

This development has immensely stimulated a shift from digital marketing channels that does not support video, and animated GIF adverts.

The leading B2B social media platform, LinkedIn plummets out of the radar as video content takes front stage and competition becomes even stronger. Only 25% of the 450 million LinkedIn users are active on the B2B social network each month (VentureBeat). Study by Pew Research also shows that 72% of adult internet users prefer to use Facebook, while only 25% would use LinkedIn.

Sites such as Twitter have continued to grow because of their video streaming capability. 82% of the users on Twitter watch video content, and 90% of these users are on mobile (Twitter). On the other hand Facebook users watch over a 100 million hour of video every day (TechCrunch). YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and others, have also continued to enjoy increasing patronage by digital marketers, while social professional platforms such as LinkedIn dwindling in patronage.

© HobSpot

Video streaming and animated GIF adverts both on mobile devices and desktop computers, have shown exceptionally strong conversion rates of up to 80% above illustrations and photographs. Also, 51.9% of marketers worldwide prefer video as the type of content with the best ROI (Adobe). Clearly, digital marketers have embraced video and animated GIF content instead of illustration and photographs.

Any digital marketer who wants to deliver good ROI would be wise not to invest on any marketing channel that does not support video and animated GIF formats. If LinkedIn truly want to maintain its leading B2B rating, it must as a matter of urgency, follow the way of Facebook messenger, Twitter and Snapchat and of course the new king of video streaming, Facebook.

After the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft and the introduction of the new desktop UI that saw most popular features in the site either removed or commercialized, the company have continued to struggle to maintain a steady user penetration rate, which has remained stagnant since 2016.

It has become a though challenge for multi-channel marketing, because media files such as video and animated GIF that are promoted freely across other platforms does not function when posted on LinkedIn.