Is video the next big thing on LinkedIn?

Find Your Superpower newsletter 071

Read time: 7 minutes

Topics covered: LinkedIn video, LinkedIn bootcamp early-bird sale ending

I first started hearing about videos popping on LinkedIn earlier this year from LinkedIn editors and other content creators.

This was followed by chatter in the community about whether videos are the “next big thing” on LinkedIn.

I will not deny that video represents the future of communication, and that’s certainly the case for the GenZs and GenAlphas around us.

As a LinkedIn coach today, I am neither dogmatic nor pedantic. I consider myself a pragmatist—if it works, it works. Whatever works, works. 

But this episode gave me major flashbacks.

For those of you who assume I began my social media adventure in 2020, then let me introduce you to an older, more ancient side of me.

I was already on Facebook in 2005

Yours truly was there, circa 2005, when Mark Zuckerberg, then still a Harvard University undergraduate student, announced that Surrey, Cambridge and Oxford University would be among three universities in the UK to have early access to The Facebook.

Using my Cambridge undergraduate cam.ac.uk email account, I was able to get early access to The Facebook.

It was a glorious moment for all of us, and I immediately “nudged” every friend of mine on it. 

Yours truly was also there managing company Facebook accounts for her magazine since early 2011.

I have a funny story to share on this: I still remember listening to an industry panel where CMOs representing top MNCs deliberated on the panel discussion topic of “Do brands need a social media page?”

And the verdict was hilariously unanimous: they agreed that a company account on social media (then, mostly Facebook) was a “nice to have” option, but a website and SEO remained the priority. Imagine how far we’ve come!

Major flashbacks from 2015

Yours truly was also there in 2015 when Mark Zuckerberg announced that videos were the next big thing on Facebook.

According to this Slate article: “Text and pictures were on the outs. Within five years, they said, Facebook’s news feed might be mostly video.”

“To back up its claims, Facebook touted impressive statistics that showed vast numbers of people were not only seeing video in their feeds, but pausing to watch videos for extended periods of time.”

I was a beneficiary of that era. We’d post a video—any video—and we would get at least 100K views nearly instantly.

I immediately got two of my interns to make videos 24-7. 

Hope was in the air. Media publishers felt a gold rush approaching.

Everyone pivoted. The big brands shunted their advertising and creative budgets to video. The big media outlets (Mic, Vice, Mashable) shunted their editorial budgets to video.

Long-form writers and editors were retrenched in favor of video scriptwriters, producers and editors.

But we soon realized that all that glitters is not gold.

From the Wall Street Journal: “Big ad buyers and marketers are upset with Facebook Inc. after learning the tech giant vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years, according to people familiar with the situation. 

Several weeks ago, Facebook disclosed in a post on its “Advertiser Help Center” that its metric for the average time users spent watching videos was artificially inflated because it was only factoring in video views of more than three seconds. The company said it was introducing a new metric to fix the problem.”

To explain further, with the help of the Slate article, Facebook was only counting views longer than three seconds in its “average,” and thus completely ignoring the vast majority of people who were scrolling right past them, to make it seem like people were watching the videos for longer than they really did.

Therefore, only a very, very small fraction of the captured metrics represented people who had watched the video for more than 3s, let alone half of the video, let alone to completion.

Fast forward to 2024, Facebook is nearly all pay-to-play. Across Facebook, organic views are down and brands mostly use paid ads to get their videos and posts seen.

It was all pump up (views) and pay up (later), basically.

Back to LinkedIn.

So when LinkedIn editors started promoting video content on LinkedIn, this social media dinosaur experienced a massive deja vu moment.

I decided to see how LinkedIn was defining a video view, and what constitutes a video viewer.

Check out the explainer for the performance of each LinkedIn video: a video view is registered when it plays for more than 2s. Two seconds.

You may have noticed these new carousels which suggest videos for you. When you scroll by a video on this carousel, soundless and contextless, it likely also registers you as a viewer if you linger on a video for 2s.

You may say, that’s alright... hopefully some actually watched the video to the end.

I decided to post a video of my own to find out.

This video I published three days ago received around 300K impressions in three days.

Not too shabby, huh. But let’s unpack the data together.

Just for reference, the video I posted is a relatively long one, at around 1:05 minutes in length.

A total of 9,605 minutes of my video was watched, or 576,300 seconds. If you divide the total number of seconds watched by 38,119 views, this video was watched for 15 seconds on average.

Which is not too bad, if you calculate it this way.

But lets also try to guesstimate how many people watched it to the end. If you recall, 2s is the minimum length to register that “a view” was made. So let’s assume that 60% of these views were casual scrollers who never really made it into the video itself:

• 60% watched 2s (22,871 views) = 762 minutes
• 30% watched halfway (11,436 views) = 5,718 minutes
• 10% watched to the end (3,812 views) = 3,812 minutes
• Total minutes watched = 10,292 minutes... close enough to the reported 9,605 minutes

NB: this is just a napkin guesstimate given that a lot of information remains lacking. 

You may wonder where all of this is going. Let me try to summarize it for you here.

Yes, the total number of video post impressions looks good, at 315K views in three days. Pretty impressive, if I may add.

But from those 315K impressions, only 38K of them were video views (of which, only 36K were unique video views).

And from that 38K of video views, unless LinkedIn gives us more video reporting metrics (like those you can find on YouTube), I can only conservatively guesstimate that 3-4K viewers reached the end of the video.

From 315k impressions to 3-4K video views, that is a 1% viewership conversion from impressions.

What does this mean for your video strategy on LinkedIn?

It is far too early for me to give you any formal recommendations, but here’s what I would suggest for now—and please bear in mind that I originate from a 2005 Facebook era where I’ve seen trends cycle across social media and so I remain unfazed and unenthused as a rule.

• Facebook has already done this pivot to video in 2015. This is not new. Many people jumped on the bandwagon. Many companies pivoted to video. Here’s how the horror story ended: incredibly amazing creatives were laid off after the video metrics did not lead to clear ROI. Please tread carefully. Don’t place all your eggs in one basket.
• LinkedIn remains a “work” social media, not a “social” social media, if you understand what I mean. LinkedIn is a place where people like to read, reflect and think. We use LinkedIn at work. Unless you’re working at the coolest place on earth or a remote worker, I believe you can’t watch YouTube, TikTok and Netflix videos all day in the office. A LinkedIn video from afar looks identical to a TikTok video. So unless our user behavior changes and we start using LinkedIn mainly at night or on weekends, it may limit the growth of video on LinkedIn.
• If you like the idea of creating video content for LinkedIn, definitely make some and test them out, but please take with a pinch of salt the impressions you receive on them. I always remind you that impressions and likes on LinkedIn don’t pay the bills. Only clients and customers do. If these videos generate warm leads and new clients, then I’m happy for you that they work. And if they don’t, then ask yourself if the 10-100x effort required to make a (good) video compared to a (good) text post is worth the return on investment (ROI). Pragmatism is the best approach in this case.

PS: if you like my analytical style of writing in this newsletter, drop me a note to let me know.

If not, this will remain an outlier in my weekly newsletter, as I generally prefer to discuss blue-sky, big-picture ideas over analytics and tactics.

Cheers,
Juliana

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Thanks for reading issue 071 of my weekly Find Your Superpower newsletter.

For those of you who are new to my newsletter, Find Your Superpower is subscribed to by 39,000+ people, and discusses the following three goals: (1) Making a career transition, (2) Professional branding on LinkedIn, and (3) Reinventing ourselves for the future of work.