LinkedIn is emerging as powerful publishing platform for content marketers. Marketing Mag features Gary Fearnall, Director of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Canada, as they examine the future of the platform.

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2. Connecting
With
Content
The social network famous for job changes and
resumé updates sees a bright new future as a
publishing platform for content marketers
BY RUSS MARTIN
This is not the social network you thought you knew.
Mike Ford
Marketing’s
LinkedIn
magazine prop
brings a smile
to the face of
Gary Fearnall,
director of
marketing.
22 July 29, 2013
Marketingmag.ca
Marketingmag.ca
Millions of people are going to the LinkedIn site continuously and
it’s not to update their work history. To some, the site may still seem
like a CV depository, a place to go during a job hunt for networking that
is more business than social. But LinkedIn is aggressively working
to change that perception and transform itself into a publisher that
will rival both Facebook’s news feed and the traditional trade press.
A place for career-minded people to consume and share content
about their industry or profession. And, most importantly, a place
for advertisers to spend their budgets connecting with those highly
engaged professional members.
One hundred and nine million people globally visited LinkedIn
each month last year. By the end of 2012, the social network had
registered 37 billion pageviews. Traffic continued to balloon in the
first quarter of 2013, jumping to 170 million unique visits per month.
Instead of a warehouse of stacked resumés, LinkedIn is now a
personalized trade publication, delivered daily to members with
stories tailored to their industry and position. And as successful as
it’s been in growing its clout in recent months, the company has even
grander ambitions. In the words of CEO Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s aim
is to be “the definitive professional publishing platform.”
It’s this pivot, LinkedIn says, that drove a huge jump in traffic last
year. Members are returning to the site more often to read whitepapers
July 29, 2013 23

3. and articles and view videos and slideshows created by industry
experts, comment on industry news in discussion groups and read
stories from media outlets and posts by influencers like Richard
Branson, Bill Gates and Barack Obama.
The company is betting big this content will carry each line of its
business on the upward trajectory they’re currently on. LinkedIn’s
revenue is split into three pieces of business (see box below): Talent
Solutions (a hub for recruiters and HR professionals), Premium Subscriptions and the ad silo, Marketing Solutions. All three increased
by more than 50% in the first quarter of this year. In fact, since its
2011 IPO, LinkedIn’s revenue has grown every single quarter. But to
continue to please the stock market—which has accorded it a rich,
almost frothy valuation by many measures—it will have to maintain
that growth and find new, deeper forms of revenue.
ments and a long-form blogging tool, LinkedIn now functions as
a professionally minded Facebook/Wordpress hybrid, creating a
more social experience.
In October, it debuted an influencer program, a feature that lets
consumers “follow” business leaders who share content on the site
(see sidebar, pg. 24). This spring, the company paid $90 million to
acquire Pulse, a mobile app that organizes blogs, magazines and
social media into a visual stream, the second major acquisition
aimed at beefing up its content capabilities (in May 2012 it acquired
SlideShare for $119 million).
Sponsored Updates are coming soon, too, further inviting comparisons between the new LinkedIn ad model and other social
titans like Twitter and Facebook. The company is currently beta
testing the ad unit with more than 20 big brands, including Shell
and American Express, and plans to release it to all advertisers later
“In the old days, you’d always have a
this year. Like Facebook, LinkedIn is selling the chance to share
video or whitepaper on your website
content with users in a social way, styling its ad units to match user
updates so they don’t look out of place.
and would drive traffic towards it.
By putting brands directly on members’ homepage feeds,
Now it’s totally different. You drive
LinkedIn is offering prime paid space within the content environto that content piece that sits within
ment it’s built, a move it’s hoping will send its marketing revenue
LinkedIn”
—Armin Huska, Mindshare
through the roof.
Content is now key to the company’s bottom line, says Ryan
For marketers paying top dollar for branded content, LinkedIn’s
Rolansky, head of content products at LinkedIn. Rolansky, who new content-minded strategic overhaul couldn’t come at a betspent two years setting LinkedIn’s ad strategy as head of ad products ter time. Instead of trying to drive traffic to content on their own
before taking his current role, says content is improving all three sites or paying traditional media publishers for the extensive real
lines of its business.
estate needed to publish branded content, brands can now publish
For starters, it’s attracting dollars earmarked for the distribu- directly to LinkedIn and use its targeted ad units to make sure
tion of content marketing in the business-to-business space and their whitepapers and blog posts end up in the hands of the corthe technology and financial sectors, accounting for a significant rect professionals.
portion of the $74.8 million LinkedIn made in ad dollars in the first
“In the old days, you’d always have a video or whitepaper on your
quarter of 2013.
website and would drive traffic towards it,” explains Armin Huska,
Content is also helping drive time spent and return visits by digital managing director at Mindshare. “Now it’s totally different.
members, increasing LinkedIn’s opportunities to market higher You drive to that content piece that sits within LinkedIn. It gives far
level subscriptions and beefing up the value proposition of active, more scale and far more reach, in a targeted way.”
career-oriented members the network makes to recruiters.
Compared to running content in a traditional publication, like
As LinkedIn’s director of marketing solutions in Canada, Gary The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, Huska says LinkedIn
Fearnall helps brands connect to LinkedIn’s coveted high-income, can provide reach without any wastage, a pain point for clients in
highly educated users.
industries like oil and gas or business-to-business technology that
His pitch to advertisers is that members
look to target a very specific niche. Huska says
are drawn to the site by a desire to be better at
his clients, including HSBC and Cisco, now
WHERE THE MONEY IS
Q1 revenue breakdown by silo
their jobs. Content from brands can help fulturn to traditional publishers only when they
full that appetite. “It’s an opportunity to have
need a partner to help them create the content.
$65.6 million
Premium Subscriptions
a much deeper relationship with members,”
For brands with well-developed content
he says. “The deeper opportunity is thinking
strategies, or those in the technology or finanabout why people are on LinkedIn and what
cial sectors, LinkedIn represents the largest—
they can expect to get out of that relationship
and often only—distribution method. As a
they have with the platform—that mindset of
general rule, Huska says brands spend 20%
saying, ‘I want to be better at what I do.’”
of their budgets on content creation and 80%
Since LinkedIn unveiled its new contenton distribution, meaning LinkedIn is poised to
oriented homepage last July—its first major
capture a huge slice of content dollars.
redesign since 2003—the company has regularly
“It’s far more targeted and more efficient for
rolled out new, more social features paired with
us. We see greater response and it’s easier lead
new ad units designed to complement its ambigeneration, giving very expensive content far
$74.8 million
tions as a publisher.
more exposure,” he says.
Marketing
$184.3 million
With “at” mentions, Klout-style endorseHubspot, a Cambridge, MassachusettsSolutions
Talent Solutions
based company that sells inbound marketing
software, has been advertising on LinkedIn
since shortly after it was founded in 2006.
Kipp Bodnar, Hubspot’s director of marketing,
says traffic from LinkedIn converts to leads and
customers at a higher rate than other social
networks, and that no other media company
can match its mix of targeting and reach in the
content space.
Bodnar sees LinkedIn’s acquisition of Slideshare last year as its first big step into the content world. By offering slideshows as ad units,
Bodnar says B2B brands with complicated product offerings like Hubspot are able to show off
their product in a way that’s both detailed and
visual.
“It will help solidify LinkedIn’s growing interest in becoming a leader in content,” Bodnar
says of the acquisition. “They’ve got Slideshare
and the influencers [program]. They’re clearly
becoming more and more invested in content.”
At the Cannes International Festival of
Creativity in France this year, LinkedIn rented
a house and invited agencies and marketers
to meet over drinks with its senior executives,
part of its ongoing campaign to pitch itself to
advertisers as the go-to network for content
marketing. Weiner also spoke about creativity
and content at an official panel and took one-onone meetings with the network’s most valued
clients.
The company will host similar events during
Ad Week in New York this fall, and conducted
a Canadian roadshow this spring, meeting
marketers, recruiters and HR professionals
LinkedIn Growing Up
Formed in 2003, LinkedIn has enjoyed its most rapid growth
in the past four years
Unique Visitors
Q1 2010 45.6 million
Q1 2011 75.1 million
Q1 2012 102.5 million
Q1 2013 131.8 million
PageViews
Q1 2010 3.6 billion
Q1 2011 7.1 billion
Q1 2012 9.4 billion
Q1 2013 11.1 billion
Net Revenue
Q1 2010 $44.7 million
$93.9 million
Q1 2011
Q1 2012 $188.5 million
Q1 2013 $324.7 million
Revenue from Marketing Solutions
(i.e. revenue from advertisers)
Q1 2010
$14.2 million
Q1 2011
$27.7 million
Q1 2012 $48 million
Q1 2013 $74.8 million
20%
23% 57%
24 July 29, 2013
Marketingmag.ca
Marketingmag.ca
July 29, 2013 25

4. LinkedIn’s
growing
influence
One of the main drivers behind
LinkedIn’s reinvention as a
publisher is its influencer program,
launched last year in an attempt to
populate the site with original posts
and videos consumers couldn’t find
anywhere else. The first influencers
were taken from CEO Jeff Weiner’s
personal network and included
tech insiders like Craig Newmark
of Craigslist and Hootsuite CEO
Ryan Holmes alongside big
names like Richard Branson and
Martha Stewart.
It also included several ad
industry execs, like Bob Jeffrey,
chairman and CEO of JWT
worldwide, Digitaria CEO Dan
Khabie and Beth Comstock, the
General Electric CMO who oversaw
the founding of Hulu.
Most recently, Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe joined the
program’s political ranks, along
with Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney (Stephen Harper, we’re
waiting). The program now has
a waiting list of industry experts
eager to make an impression on
LinkedIn users.
Though the program is a boon
for LinkedIn, it’s also a chance
for the influencers to get in front
of their industries and increase
their social presence. The web
series Jeffrey participated in for
LinkedIn brought in 1.3 million
views, drawing positive attention to
JWT. “Professionals from around
the world go to LinkedIn to network
and gain insights, particularly from
their influencer program. Sharing
our own celebration of thought
leadership through Worldmakers
was a perfect pairing,” says Erin
Johnson, chief communications
officer of JWT Worldwide.
26 July 29, 2013
at events in Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and
Vancouver. At these events, Fearnall pitched
the company’s vision for content and array of
new ad products to crowds, which were lured
in by cocktails and the promise of learning
how to better engage with LinkedIn users.
To prove itself as a publisher and solution for
content marketers, though, LinkedIn will have
to deliver results, not just a flashy pitch. Customers like Hubspot and Mindshare rave about
LinkedIn’s high conversion rates and granular
targeting, but also admit that for the type of
content they’re promoting, there are, at least
for now, few other mass distribution options.
Even before its content transformation,
LinkedIn played in a field of its own. Marketers turn to LinkedIn for different reasons than
Twitter or Facebook, two companies that may be
perceived as its chief competition. As Fearnall
explains, LinkedIn focuses on the business-tobusiness, technology and finance sectors, while
those media players offer mass audiences for
retailers and packaged goods companies.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s pitch to advertisers
focuses on its ability to target niche, careerminded consumers by their income and industry.
Even the marketing speak is different. Brands on
other social networks try to be fun and playful,
while brands on LinkedIn aim to be pragmatic
and useful.
Direct challengers are even fewer and further in between. Germany’s Xing, a European
LinkedIn clone launched in 2003, is home
to just seven million professionals. The size
of the French professional network Viadeo,
launched in 2004, similarly pales in comparison to LinkedIn’s member base of 225 million.
In the U.S., the Wall Street Journal is planning
a professional network, but mock-ups shown
to investors in New York this spring and later
posted online appeared to show no discernable difference that would give it a hand up on
LinkedIn.
The biggest challenge for LinkedIn doesn’t
come from a direct competitor, but a potential
change in ad land tides. The company’s content
push follows the same trajectory as content marketing itself, which exploded in growth in the past
year. But the ad business is a fickle one and trends
come and go quicker than one can say “Bitcoin”
(or, for that matter, “MySpace”).
Rolansky says he’s not worried the company
may build a content empire only to see the content business slump. LinkedIn as a publisher is
as much about its members as it is its advertisers, he says.
“We’ve seen how much our members interact with content and we strongly believe that
having access to the right information at
the right time ultimately helps inform and
inspire,” he says. “We feel we are only just getting warmed up and have much more planned
ahead to bring the next generation of content
consumption experiences.”
Marketingmag.ca