LinkedIn has announced that it will begin testing advertisements within its ‘Stories’ format in the US.
LinkedIn Stories ads will enable marketers to utilise LinkedIn’s range of ad tools to target specific audiences, and reach them with full-screen video and single-image ads.
Stories Ads are immersive, full-screen video and single-image ads served in vertical and square orientations from existing Sponsored Content campaigns.
They are served in between member-posted Stories and LinkedIn Page Stories at the top of the LinkedIn mobile app.
In a statement, LinkedIn said: “Today, we’re excited to announce that we are testing Stories Ads with a limited number of advertisers in a closed beta with all members globally. Stories Ads can help brands grow their reach with our community of more than 722M members with video and image ads. Already, we have had more than 600 advertisers activate campaigns with positive performance in clicks, views and cost metrics.”
The business-based social media platform said it’s currently testing Stories Ads with a beta group of advertisers, and plans to launch them more broadly in 2021.
Commenting on the move, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, President at social media marketing platform, Socialbakers, highlighted that whilst ads within stories have performed well for Snapchat and Instagram, there are significant differences between the demographics across these platforms and LinkedIn.
“Giving businesses the possibility to leverage ads in the Stories format is nothing new in the social space. B2C brands have been successfully leveraging ads on Snapchat and Instagram Stories for some time as a tried and tested format that yields good results. But LinkedIn’s user demographics differ significantly from Snapchat or Instagram,” Ben-Itzhak said.
“According to Socialbakers Q3 social media benchmark data, ads on Instagram Stories made up around 10% of the ad spend on Facebook. But LinkedIn targets a different demographic to Snapchat and Instagram. With a user base that’s more B2B focused and a demographic that skews much older than Snapchat or Instagram (according to Statista as of Q3 2020, 40 percent of U.S. internet users aged 46 to 55 years used LinkedIn, while only 19 percent of internet users aged 15 to 25 years did the same), it remains to be seen how well ads in Stories will perform versus the more traditional Feed ads.”