Get excited for big changes coming to LinkedIn in the near future! LinkedIn recently announced some upcoming product initiatives we can expect to arrive starting now through the end of next year. I’m here to break it all down and to let you know what I’m most excited about.
LinkedIn Stories & Story Ads
Yes, LinkedIn now has a Story feature. Much like Facebook & Instagram Stories, LinkedIn Stories are shared for 24 hours, and allow users to express professional moments with their network without worrying that the content is permanently attached to their profile.
To post a Story on your profile, open your LinkedIn app and touch the circle with your photo and a plus sign in the upper left corner to open the camera. You can:
Record the video or take the photo directly through the app
- Upload video (up to 20s) or image
- Add a sticker and / or text
- Mention users with @
These officially launched on September 24th, 2020 — make sure to check them out if you haven’t already!
I’m most excited about the advertising potential this new product will bring to the platform. LinkedIn has already confirmed that Story ads will have their own inventory to bid & buy from. We don’t have all the details yet but here’s what we do know so far.
You will not have to create a separate campaign in order to use this new ad type. They can be run in existing video or image campaigns AND you can do multiple formats in a single campaign (e.g. video + image in one campaign). When stories ads launch, they will be available for all objectives. However, for the beta, all objectives except lead gen + talent objectives will be available.
Document Ads
Another exciting ad format coming to LinkedIn are Document Ads. With this ad format, you can upload and sponsor documents such as white papers or case studies seamlessly into the LinkedIn platform which will enable you to drive engagement and leads directly within the LinkedIn feed. Document Ads will not be gated content (like Lead Forms) and they will enable users to stay in the platform while consuming content rather than be redirected to a landing page to view a document.
Event Ads
Event Ads will be released in January 2021, and will fit nicely with brands that host LinkedIn Events. Event Ads will actually allow you to target audiences with a very specific and unique event ad format that will allow brands to create an ad that will have an RSVP experience within the ad itself. The idea is that this ad type will help facilitate attendance and scale viewership and engagement.
Campaign Manager Lite
This slimmed down version of LinkedIn Campaign Manager will be released in Q3 of 2020 and will be available to small businesses who don’t feel the need to invest in the larger Campaign Manager. With Campaign Manager Lite, a company can experiment with LinkedIn ads by directly sponsoring their organic content from the feed and test a simplified version of the campaign creation experience.
LinkedIn Business Manager
LinkedIn Business Manager will be launching in Q2 of 2021 and will be one of LinkedIn’s most sophisticated updates they released in some time. It will be a centralized tool to efficiently and securely manage user access across Ad Accounts, Pages, and Matched Audiences. It will work similarly to Facebook’s Business Manager where companies can grant various degrees of permissions to agencies and partners to help manage their Ad Accounts.
I’m really excited for the level of organization this will bring to the agency side of managing a brand’s Ad Accounts. Too often I find myself needing to request permission to create ads for new clients which really creates a bottleneck when you’re trying to create multiple campaigns in a week. Hopefully this new feature will eliminate a lot of that back and forth, and allow companies to effortlessly grant multiple account managers the proper permissions they need.
So which new LinkedIn product update are you most excited about? Make sure to follow @ppchero on social media and let us know!
