Business owners and advertisers can soon targeted LinkedIn users with video ads. According to TechCrunch, the popular social media network is rolling out a new native video ad format that appears in users’ feeds.
LinkedIn’s new video ads will play automatically, meaning users won’t have to click the “play” button to watch them. The ads won’t, however, play sound automatically. If a user wants to listen to a video ad, he or she must click to enable it.
There’s been a growing push to eliminate autoplay video with sound in recent weeks. On May 21, Google said the next version of its Chrome web browser will mute autoplay videos with sound by default, citing the negative effects it has user experience. LinkedIn has apparently heeded Google’s warning by choosing to disable audio on its video ads by default.
The new video ads appear in users’ news feeds as standalone posts with the “sponsored” label. LinkedIn says the video ads can help businesses attract leads, drive traffic to their websites, increase brand exposure and generate more sales.
LinkedIn’s new native video ads signals a growing demand for video content. In August 2017, the social media network rolled out video uploading for users. This feature allows LinkedIn users to upload videos to the platform. The key difference, however, is that these videos aren’t ads.
LinkedIn has actually been testing native video ads with select advertisers since October, 2017. According to the social network, some 700 advertisers have been experimenting with video ads. With this ad format being rolled out to all advertisers, though, we’ll probably see more video ads on LinkedIn.
In addition to native video ads, LinkedIn is also allowing businesses to upload video to their Company Pages. When it rolled out the video uploading feature last August, it was limited strictly to user profiles and not Company Pages. But during beta testing, LinkedIn discovered that videos published on Company Pages generated 500 percent more engagement than other types of content, so it’s now rolling this feature out to businesses.
Founded 2002, LinkedIn is a social media network that caters to business owners and professionals. Unlike most other social networks, it’s primary source of revenue comes from selling access to users’ profiles. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.4 billion.
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