LinkedIn Stories for B2B Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn needs no introduction to B2B marketers, who practically live there these days. The site continues to go from strength to strength, and now has 90 million LinkedIn users who are senior-level influencers. Clearly, LinkedIn offers a significant opportunity to reach otherwise hard-to-access decision-makers.

In a hyper-competitive market, the dilemma of whether to openly share information about products and plans with clients and customers about your company’s products or internal workings is a notoriously difficult issue for B2B marketers and product managers. Despite the concerns of showing too much, transparency and an open, engaged approach to gaining feedback from users can be invaluable for a company.

Who better than LinkedIn, then, to lead in this space? A recent blog post by LinkedIn’s Pete Davies, head of its content products, has created significant excitement, confirming that LinkedIn is testing a new conversational format called LinkedIn Stories: “We’re testing Stories…. The format will help kickstart the conversations and nurture the relationships that are core to everything that happens on LinkedIn.”

With 97% of B2B marketers already using it for their own content marketing efforts, what does the introduction of LinkedIn’s own version of Stories mean?

The concept of “stories” was first rolled out by Snapchat and then added to Instagram’s feature set, where it now forms a key part of those channels’ daily experience now. Facebook has announced that Instagram Stories surpassed its competition by acquiring 250 million daily active users within a year of its launch. That’s approximately 50% of Instagram’s total number of daily active users, and 500 million users now use Instagram Stories every day, according to Sprout Social.

Other platforms, such as Facebook and now YouTube, have also played with the concept. It was introduced on Facebook in 2017, and YouTube Stories is available to Community users (those with over 10,000 subscribers). Pinterest also has Story Pins, and recently Kayvon Beykpour, product lead at Twitter, confirmed that Twitter is testing a new story-like feature, called Fleets. Fleets will disappear after 24 hours and cannot be retweeted or liked, and cannot be replied to publicly—only via DM.

How Will LinkedIn ‘Own’ This Space for B2B?