Today’s question is about posting YouTube videos on LinkedIn. Question are asked, I want to post videos to LinkedIn but I don’t want to stop posting on YouTube. Do you think it’s a bad idea to put the same video on both platforms? Will that have any negative impact?
Publishing videos to social media platforms
Fundamentally, I think it’s absolutely fine normally to post the same video content on multiple platforms, in this case, YouTube and LinkedIn. The one thing you do need to bear in mind though when posting on multiple platforms are things like ratios and running times. Each platform will have their own guidelines in terms of what they will and won’t accept in terms of a video file. So in this case, you may have a, say 12 minute YouTube video. Now LinkedIn caps the running time of natively uploaded video to 10 minutes.
Optimum Running Time
So you’ve got a couple of options here. You either trim your original YouTube video so it fits within that 10 minute LinkedIn limit or you can make sure that none of your YouTube videos run over 10 minutes if you’re always going to be uploading to LinkedIn as well as YouTube.
That all comes down to planning which is why you need to really understand your audience and you need to know where they live online. And then you can decide the strategy upfront which best suits your business in terms of where to post your video content.
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Now, just because you can upload a 10-minute video to LinkedIn, don’t assume that that’s the best running time for that platform. It’s all to do with the audience on each platform and the way that they consume video that is posted on it. So you do need to do your research.
According to LinkedIn’s own guidelines, the optimum running time for LinkedIn videos is around the three to four-minute mark. Now that’s way shorter than the optimum YouTube video length for example which is around about seven and a half to eight minutes.
So you can see that it’s not just a case of copy and pasting your video content from one platform onto another. You definitely need to consider the nuances and preferences on each platform. Otherwise, you risk wasting your time posting content that just doesn’t meet the needs of your audience. And worst ways, it could actually negatively impact the perception of your business if you are way off the mark.
Three basic options when posting video on LinkedIn
When it comes to actually posting video on LinkedIn, you’ve got three basic options.
1. Posting YouTube video link
Now, your first option is to create a post and then simply paste the link from the YouTube video in the post.
If you’ve done this in the past you may have noticed that the engagement on those posts wasn’t quite what you’d hoped for. And the main reason for this is that LinkedIn, just like other social platforms and networking platforms, want to keep people on their platform for the longest time possible. What you’re actually doing by including a link to a YouTube video, is advertising content that is off-platform.
LinkedIn really doesn’t like this. To be fair though, no social platforms like it because they want people to stay engaged on their particular platform. They don’t want people being tempted away to spend time on a rival platform.
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2. Upload video thumbnail and create a post
If you still want to drive traffic to your YouTube channel directly from LinkedIn, then upload the video thumbnail and create a post.
But whatever you do, don’t include a link to YouTube in the main body of the post. The post itself is effectively the hook to get people interested in the content of your video, to earn that click. Then at the end of the copy you just need to say something like, to view the video, click the link in the comments below. Then obviously in the first comment underneath that post, you then link to the YouTube video itself.
However, to maximize your video engagement on LinkedIn, the best way by far is to natively upload your video file to the platform itself. That’s another way of saying, create a video post in LinkedIn. Like I mentioned before though, that does mean that the video has to be a maximum of 10 minutes long. However, if LinkedIn is a central part of your video marketing strategy, then it’s probably worth you taking the time to trim your YouTube videos to create LinkedIn friendly versions.
3. Live streaming
If you’re creating regular video content for LinkedIn and you’re struggling to keep it to under 10 minutes, then one option would be to apply for LinkedIn live. Live streaming to LinkedIn, which you have to apply for, allows you to stream video for up to four hours.
Final thoughts
I really hope you have got lots of value from this. We’ve got a free YouTube resource, obviously which is a Bitly link there Business Growth With Video. If you’d like to download a Business Video Guide, go to that URL and ping us your email details, and we will be really chuffed to rush you a copy of the 20 page PDF, that’d be fantastic, I’d hope you’d find that super useful.
To dive into more detail about how to create video for your business, do check out the other videos on our YouTube channel.
