How LinkedIn is becoming a hot spot for influencer marketing

LinkedIn—arguably the most uncool place on the internet—is becoming a hot spot for influencer marketing. Case in point: There’s a new agency called Creator Authority that is entirely focused on brokering deals between creators and brands on the platform. Founded in January 2024 by Brendan Gahan, former Mekanism partner and chief innovation officer, and Mandi Hopper, formerly of influencer agency Collectively, Creator Authority bills itself as a “LinkedIn influencer marketing company,” Gahan said. The creator agency offers services including influencer discovery, strategy development, content management, reporting and paid media. Sign up for Ad Age’s new LinkedIn newsletter here Gahan’s decision to lean into LinkedIn comes as the platform has become increasingly desirable for influencer marketing, according to experts. Public content shared on LinkedIn increased by 24% from 2022 to 2023, according to Creator Authority, while there are now over 139,000 newsletters (with more than 472 million total newsletter subscribers) on the platform. LinkedIn said it hit 1 billion members in November. Natalie Marshall, aka Corporate Natalie, is among the influencers who have embraced LinkedIn over the last couple of years. Corporate Natalie, who has built a following online with her humorous work-from-home videos, has nearly 53,000 followers on LinkedIn, compared to around 835,000 on Instagram and 653,000 on TikTok. “My LinkedIn community is growing more comfortable with short-form video content, so finding a way to monetize and promote B2B brands that I care about would be the next logical step,” Corporate Natalie said in an email to Ad Age. “I’m still in the process of experimenting which types of content play best on my LinkedIn channel, and if there was an agency specialized in properly executing partnerships on LinkedIn, working together would be a no-brainer for me.” Before the 2021 launch of LinkedIn’s so-called creator mode, a profile setting that provides users access to a suite of content creation tools and boosts the reach of their posts, influencers getting paid to make content on LinkedIn was incredibly rare, according to Gahan. But since then, the demand for influencer marketing on the platform has grown—and naturally, so have creator paychecks. “For a lot of people they’re making some nice supplemental revenue,” Gahan said, though LinkedIn work isn’t paying six or seven figures per post like other platforms, he said. It’s a nascent market and brand deals still aren’t commonplace on LinkedIn, so many brands aren’t sure what to charge, according to Gahan. Influencers with large followings on other platforms are starting to charge an additional 10% or 25% to extend a campaign to LinkedIn, according to Gahan. LinkedIn has also recruited creators through initiatives such as its Creator Accelerator Program, a six-week incubator-style program. MrBeast, who has over 165,000 followers on LinkedIn (compared to 241 million on YouTube), is also on the Microsoft-owned platform. “Marrying creators with Linkedin’s features is a no-brainer. It’s a brand-safe, engaged and highly affluent audience. With everything from text to video to live streaming and audio events, LinkedIn is ripe for telling real consumer stories,” Gahan said. Also read: Creators and brands navigate a tense political climate Creator Authority’s clients, including fintech company Tipalti, work with the agency to identify which influencers are best suited to reach a brand’s target audience. The agency then enlists those creators for campaigns, including through LinkedIn newsletter sponsorships, as well as written and video content such as LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Audio Events. From there, Creator Authority’s team manages the efforts and compiles reports that track engagement, reach, conversions and other metrics. Gahan declined to identify other clients. Evan Heby, director of marketing at Tipalti, said the company is investing in influencer partnerships on LinkedIn because its target audience is on the platform. Most recently, Tipalti used influencers on LinkedIn to syndicate a recent research report it produced about the creator economy. “I see influencer marketing as the tippy top of the marketing funnel: a way to expand our [total addressable market] that needs to be coupled with other sales and marketing strategies to prove significant ROI,” Heby said. As far as paid media, “relevant paid media is a great way to scale influencer marketing. For some campaigns we’ll work with creators to promote and/or license content for paid media support,” Gahan added. Updating an old social media platform The increase in creator opportunities on LinkedIn, founded in 2003, stems from a few key changes it made over the past few years, Gahan said. The first, and most obvious, change was an update to the algorithm that prioritized creator content. Throughout 2023, LinkedIn overhauled its algorithm to serve posts based on two key factors—whether the post was from someone a user followed and whether that post contained “knowledge and advice” relevant to the user, based on the algorithm’s analysis, according to LinkedIn’s Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth. And unlike most social media platforms, virality is not a factor in the content served to users on LinkedIn, according to an April 2023 post on the platform’s engineering blog. “LinkedIn has done a lot to promote that content [from creators],” said Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “It’s deprioritized content like work anniversary posts and other content that people have deemed ‘cringe-worthy’ and really started to elevate that high-value content on the platform, most of which is really coming from these creators.” The cringe-inducing content she’s referring to includes the stereotypical posts some have come to associate with LinkedIn, such as lengthy CEO apologies that face widespread mockery, or the platform’s inescapable “I’m thrilled to announce” post format. Along with retooling its algorithm, LinkedIn also heavily invested in expanding resources available for creators on its platform. In 2021, LinkedIn established an internal creator management team and rolled out its creator mode, which allowed creators to be “followed” by other users and also gives creators the option to label their accounts with hashtags for relevant topics they post about. In February, however, LinkedIn announced it would be removing profile hashtags as it moves away from hashtag-based discoverability. And rather than turning on creator mode, anyone who meets the “access criteria” for creator mode—which include having at least 150 followers or connections and having recently posted on the platform—will automatically gets “access to sharing tools such as LinkedIn Live, Audio Events, and Newsletter,” according to LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Audio Events feature, effectively its answer to the Clubhouse audio app, has been a core part of creator and content marketer Jayde Powell’s strategy on the platform. When she began shifting her focus from X, formerly Twitter, to LinkedIn in early 2022, she also launched her LinkedIn audio series “#CreatorTeaTalk.” And she was stunned to have an audience of roughly 100 listeners for each of her first two live episodes, she said. “LinkedIn is now my preferred platform, which I never thought would ever happen,” Powell said. “When I was on Twitter more often, I would literally tweet about how much I hated LinkedIn … But the reach and engagement on LinkedIn, surprisingly, is actually quite high. And I think for creators who are wanting to grow their platforms outside of a traditional TikTok or Instagram, [LinkedIn] is a great way to do it.” Powell now devotes 70% of her time to creating content on LinkedIn, and splits the other 30% evenly between X and Instagram, she said. And in the two years since she began prioritizing LinkedIn, she’s expanded her following from 5,000 to nearly 14,500—a much faster growth rate than she’s seen on Instagram, where it’s taken her five years to amass a little over 8,000 followers. But Powell didn’t alter the casual, stream-of-consciousness posting style she uses on X and Instagram when she made the jump to LinkedIn, she said. Many of her posts on the platform are reminiscent of X posts, written entirely in lowercase and only one or two sentences long. “There was a very intentional mindset for me that I wasn’t going to change who I was just because I was on LinkedIn now,” she said. “Just because I’m on a professional platform, it doesn’t mean I have to be all buttoned up or only talk about work. And I think there is a desire for younger professionals—millennials and Gen Z, specifically—to basically make this statement that ‘I can be a professional and be a person that has a career while also maintaining my own level of authenticity.” LinkedIn influencers As part of its ongoing efforts to court creators, LinkedIn has begun laying “the foundations for an ecosystem of paid, organic and influencer marketing,” Insider’s Enberg said. “And, crucially, B2C marketers are starting to take note. Those influencer marketing foundations include LinkedIn’s introduction of “brand partnership” labels for sponsored posts in August 2023, following in the footsteps of other influencer-heavy social platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and streamlining the disclosure process. Most of the influencer marketing occurring on LinkedIn at this point has been among B2B brands, some of which have already seen notable impacts from working with influencers such as business owners, analysts, thought leaders and even their own employees. According to a recent report from Ogilvy, 75% of more than 550 B2B executives surveyed by the agency said they leverage B2B influencer marketing—and of that 75%, nearly all (93%) said they planned to invest further in influencers in the future. And 92% of respondents agreed that targeted marketing involving B2B influencers is “an effective strategy for increasing brand consideration and customer acquisition,” per the report. Working with B2B creators on LinkedIn evolved into a core influencer marketing strategy for productivity and note-taking app Notion over the past year, said Danielle Ito, Notion’s influencer marketing manager. In early 2023, Notion began teaming up with sales leaders, marketing executives, heads of tech teams and other LinkedIn thought leaders to promote its “Notion for Enterprise” plan and highlight the app’s business use cases, she said. “This last year has really been a testament to how creators are really realizing that they can use [LinkedIn] as a space to leverage their voice and share their thoughts on whatever their niche is,” Ito said. “Even as we have started to grow our LinkedIn influencer marketing practice, I think the sheer number of creators on the platform has grown along with us. And professionals who maybe aren’t your typical content creator but who do have great insights or can share an opinion on the work that they're doing—those types of people are really coming up, too, as a new type of creator.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Notion’s work with B2B LinkedIn influencers has since expanded beyond the U.S., with a focus on France, especially, Ito said. Although Ito and her team used to comb through relevant hashtags to find influencers, Notion now works with several LinkedIn influencer agencies to source creators. Plus, Ito said, “I feel like I have influencers all over my own feed now, too. Ito and her team are planning to invest more in B2C creators on LinkedIn who can share how they leverage the app in their personal lives, such as for travel planning or home organization, she said. “I think there are definitely more people who are just scrolling on LinkedIn than ever before,” Ito said. “So, we are tying in some of those personal use cases—which would be our B2C sector—on LinkedIn.” Creators including Powell, too, have begun to extend their brand partnerships to LinkedIn. Powell developed #CreatorTeaTalk at the suggestion of Sprout Social, one of her longtime brand partners, and the social media management software provider has since sponsored several episodes of her audio series. And in late 2023, she signed with LinkedIn influencer marketing and talent management agency Influence by Verbatim to help her secure more brand partners on the platform. The agency, launched last year, is a branch of marketing studio Verbatim founded by LinkedIn creators Brianna Doe and Alexis Rivera Scott. Though she’s only worked with Sprout Social on LinkedIn so far, she’s currently in talks with about three other brands about sponsoring her LinkedIn content, she said. “People who are professionals in their career can also be influential, and I think that’s something that I’ve been kind of discovering,” Powell said. “If I’m a creator and I’m working with tools like Canva or Grammarly or Descript, why wouldn’t I have partnerships with those brands?” B2C marketers are increasingly beginning to consider LinkedIn as a platform for influencer marketing campaigns, Enberg said. About 72% of LinkedIn’s U.S. users are millennials or older, per Insider Intelligence data, and the majority of its users are college-educated, “which means they probably have higher-paying jobs and more money to spend, and I think that’s becoming really attractive to marketers,” she said. Additionally, Gen Z is LinkedIn’s fastest-growing age cohort in the U.S., and Insider Intelligence projects the platform’s number of Gen Z users will soar nearly 14% by the end of 2024. LinkedIn also offers a “safe, more positive” backdrop for marketing campaigns that can be hard to come by on other social platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, Enberg said. “X’s loss is LinkedIn’s gain. Brands are drawn to LinkedIn seeking stability and ad efficacy. The platform stands in stark contrast to X’s toxic environment and ineffective advertising,” Gahan said, adding that, “facing X’s turmoil, users pivot to LinkedIn’s trusted, stable network, a stark contrast to the chaos.”

How LinkedIn is becoming a hot spot for influencer marketing

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