UPDATE: LinkedIn decided to terminate the LinkedIn Stories feature on September 30, 2021. I recommend checking out my LinkedIn blog for alternative strategies and tactics that you can use to grow your business on LinkedIn.
Why should LinkedIn Stories play a big part in your LinkedIn strategy?
Stories on other platforms have proven themselves to be extremely powerful.
On Instagram for example, more than 500 million users engage with Instagram Stories every day and up to 25% of users swipe up on stories.
That’s super powerful!
And now, finally…
LinkedIn has released its own version of stories!
Welcome to LinkedIn Stories!
LinkedIn Stories are LinkedIn’s secret weapon and should play an important role in every business’s social media strategy.
Not only are they fun to create, but they also offer a ton of benefits for every business owner.
You can use LinkedIn Stories to highlight your products and services and promote any message that you want to share with your audience.
In this article, you’ll discover how to turn LinkedIn Stories into one of your company's most powerful tools for your LinkedIn strategy!
How Do LinkedIn Stories Work?
LinkedIn Stories are inspired by popular story formats on other platforms such as Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, or Twitter Fleets.
You can create photo stories or short 20-second vertical video stories. LinkedIn Stories are visible for 24 hours only and will disappear afterward.
At this time, you can only share LinkedIn Stories from the LinkedIn mobile app.
10 Reasons Why Every Business Must Use LinkedIn Stories!
You might be wondering why LinkedIn Stories are a must-have addition to your lead generation strategy for any LinkedIn content creator.
Let me explain…
With LinkedIn Stories, you can interact directly with your audience in order to better understand their needs.
Try asking your followers questions to get them involved in your story, and have them share their interests.
If you want to obtain more followers on LinkedIn and grow your organic reach on LinkedIn, you’ll have to invest your time in creating a LinkedIn Stories strategy.
Start communicating with other people, build relationships, and comment on others’ content.
1. Generate hot leads with LinkedIn stories.
Why are most companies using LinkedIn Stories?
To generate leads, of course!
Today, LinkedIn Stories are one of the most powerful LinkedIn lead generation tools.
LinkedIn Stories have been rolled out all around the globe in every country. But not a lot of people are actively creating stories on LinkedIn at the moment.
LinkedIn Stories enjoy a very prominent placement. Whenever you’re opening the app on your phone, you will notice that the first line of your LinkedIn app is filled with stories.
The first circle on the left with the little + allows you to share your own story. And to the right, you see a list of LinkedIn Stories by other people and companies.
If you compare the number of LinkedIn Stories with the number of posts in your newsfeed you will notice that not many people are creating LinkedIn Stories.
The number of LinkedIn Stories by businesses is even lower.
So there is a great opportunity right there!
But how do you use LinkedIn Stories to generate leads?
You have to create interesting and engaging content, that raises your audience’s curiosity level about you and your business!
Maybe you're reminding them about a specific challenge they're facing right now. Or you're demonstrating a quick tip that could help them solve a specific business challenge.
And then, by using the swipe-up feature, you can guide them towards another resource to collect their contact information.
2. Grow your LinkedIn audience
Did you know that you can use LinkedIn Stories to attract more followers on LinkedIn?
Growing your audience basically means creating pools of prospects and leads who are just one step away from converting into customers.
LinkedIn Stories open up an entirely new way how you can grow your LinkedIn network by interacting with potential leads on LinkedIn in new and exciting ways.
Even if your stories only last for 24 hours, LinkedIn stories are discoverable, and people who don’t follow you can see your posts too.
It can be a great opportunity to reach a new audience and express your ideas more uniquely, while also showcasing your products or services in a fun way.
At this time, LinkedIn Stories don’t allow you to attach hashtags to your stories for organic discoverability, but your audience can forward your stories to their connections, allowing more and more people to learn about you!
Sharing of LinkedIn Stories is very different from sharing LinkedIn posts. While shared posts are publicly shared in your activity feed, stories aren’t. They are forwarded as a personal message, meaning only you – the sender – and the recipient of your message will ever know that you shared a story.
That’s actually amazing because many people don’t feel comfortable sharing content publicly in any case. They worry that they might reveal too much about themselves or that others might judge them. With personal messages, that’s totally different!
3. Interact with your audience
Stories are a very interactive content format. But interactions with LinkedIn Stories are different from interactions with LinkedIn posts.
While LinkedIn posts allow your audience to write public comments, LinkedIn Stories allow your audience to comment in form of direct messages!
This allows for real-time communication between your audience and you, which increases overall engagement rates and allows you to build strong emotional connections with your fans.
4. Increasing the visibility of your brand on LinkedIn.
Whenever you’re posting a LinkedIn Story, your story will be visible to your followers and connections the minute they log into the LinkedIn app on their phone, right at the top.
This gives you another great opportunity to highlight your brand on LinkedIn, together with your LinkedIn Profile, LinkedIn company page, LinkedIn Posts, LinkedIn Articles, LinkedIn Live Streaming, etc.
You can look at LinkedIn Stories as another form of LinkedIn real estate. Another opportunity to place and position your brand on your audience’s screen space.
Your followers will also be notified when you’ve published a new Story, making them harder to miss than the regular LinkedIn post.
When you don't show up in your audience's newsfeed every time they log into LinkedIn, they might eventually forget about you. And when they forget about you, they might remember someone else, hopefully not your competitor who showed up daily… 😉
5. Stay at the top of your audience’s mind by getting your prospects to think about you on a daily basis.
The more your audience hears from you, the more they’ll remember you when the need for one of your products or services arises.
Think of LinkedIn Stories as your secret weapon in this regard.
Daily LinkedIn Stories can make all the difference between receiving daily phone calls from potential clients, and suffering in a dark corner of your office in agony because you didn’t close any new deals.
And you don’t have to limit yourself to just one story per day.
6. Get instant feedback about new products or services.
LinkedIn Stories is a great tool for consumer research. The real-time nature of LinkedIn Stories allows for instant feedback to a quick audience question, or a more comprehensive analysis by attaching a survey form to one of your stories.
This will allow you to develop and optimize your products and services and align them with what your customers actually want!
Even before the launch of a new product, you can use LinkedIn Stories to do market research and to ask your audience for some honest feedback.
Say you’re uncertain about the usefulness of specific functionality, or even the look and feel of a new release. All you have to do is go to Stories and ask your followers about what they need or about their preferences.
7. Tell authentic brand stories and create a strong emotional bond with your audience with behind-the-scenes content.
One of the best ways to generate a ton of eyeballs for your business is to show people what’s going on behind the scenes.
Showing your network that there’s a personality behind the business creates a more personal experience with your audience and allows your brand to create more authentic and personal relationships with clients and customers.
In the past, many schools of marketing focused on creating the appearance of absolute perfection, using the best equipment, and doing everything in their power to ensure that nobody would ever see a single mistake.
Most people however perceived these efforts in a totally different way. Companies appeared to them like hollow, empty shells, hiding behind big corporate logos with no personality or soul.
Thank Goodness, these days are long gone… By showing your audience the people behind the brand, you’re giving your brand a face and personality that allows people to feel connected.
Companies with a human face experience a plenitude of benefits, customers are more engaged, buy more frequently, value your products and services more, spend more, and are more cooperative with customer service requests. It’s a game-changer!
Show your viewers behind-the-scenes videos and highlight the people behind your products and their personalities, the day-to-day, the struggles, and the victories alike!
For example, if you’re running a swimwear fashion company, use LinkedIn Stories to show your audience how new designs are created, how outfits are being manufactured, product photo shoots, packaging new orders, or visiting industry fairs.
Don’t be afraid to show your connections that you’re a real person with faults.
If something went wrong, create a story and explain how it happened and how you’re applying the lessons learned to prevent this from happening in the future.
Share your wins and achievements as well. Did you make a big sale or sign up a new client? Create a LinkedIn Story about it, explaining what went on behind the scenes and what you did well.
You don’t have to give away sensitive information. Just let your network know about your successes and motivate them to reach out and connect with you. Doing this shows authenticity!
Remember, people don’t hire brands, they hire people.
LinkedIn Stories provide the most significant opportunity to stand out on LinkedIn from your competition while creating a brand that your audience will love! 🙂
8. Promote your blog with LinkedIn stories
Every business MUST HAVE a blog. Having an arsenal of really good articles about questions that potential prospects and customers would search for on Google is one of the best marketing tools to drive organic traffic to your website. Period.
The only downside is, that it sometimes takes a while until a new article shows up on Google. You can dramatically reduce the time it takes Google to index and rank your articles with two strategies.
- Get other bloggers and writers to link to your article.
- Generate your own traffic to demonstrate to Google how important and relevant your article would be to your ideal audience.
LinkedIn Stories allow you to do both, in one swipe.
If you have grown a strong LinkedIn network of customers, prospects, and respectable peers, you already have your dream audience who would love to devour every one of your new articles. Chances are high, that several of them, do actually have their own blog.
By promoting your article via LinkedIn Stories and the swipe-up feature, you give them plenty of new material to link to regularly. You also get many clients and potential customers to read your article. This allows Google to assess the quality of your articles through platforms such as Google Analytics and AdSense accounts.
Also very important:
You should always host your blog on your own website, otherwise, linkedin.com would get all the link juice from your brand-new backlinks, and not your own domain.
It also gives you way more flexibility in terms of visitor statistics and website analytics.
9. Promote your YouTube channel with LinkedIn stories
Did you know that you can also use LinkedIn Stories to promote your own YouTube channel?
What many of you might not know is that YouTube is actually the world’s second-largest search engine after Google. Many people don’t even start their search on Google in the first place, they go directly to YouTube first.
Best of all, your YouTube videos can also rank on google.com. That happens quite frequently, actually.
YouTube offers you a wide variety of options to promote your own website or any landing page you might want to highlight and to create a constant influx of organic traffic.
Now, to grow a successful YouTube channel, you have to generate your own traffic first and prove to Google that your video is a good one. The more relevant people watch your videos, the better YouTube gets at recommending your videos to similar people.
You can achieve this by sharing your YouTube videos in your LinkedIn Stories. Simply attach the swipe-up feature to your story and share the link to your YouTube video!
Then use LinkedIn Stories and YouTube to build real relationships with potential customers with long-form videos.
If you don’t already have a YouTube channel, get one! If you need some guidance, check out my articles about how to get your first 1000 YouTube subscribers and also a comprehensive "How to upload your videos - the Ultimate YouTube Upload Checklist".
10. Real-time marketing
Most people, when they hear the term real-time marketing might think of features such as LinkedIn Live, Webinars, and other interactive online events, but not of LinkedIn Stories.
But LinkedIn Stories is actually one of THE BEST tools for real-time marketing communications!
The issue starts with the perception of marketing. If you’re sharing a high-gloss, marketing, and copywriting approved photo on LinkedIn as a regular post, people perceive this the same way they perceive OFFLINE marketing. Something that has been planned and scheduled for many weeks. And nobody is going to reply to my comment anyway, so why bother…
LinkedIn Stories are different. There is a special type of magic around LinkedIn Stories and the idea of being able to communicate with your audience in real-time.
And because of this, your audience is way more responsive and more likely to engage with your content and to reach out to you!
Run LinkedIn stories ads
The new LinkedIn Stories Ads allow you to use the popular LinkedIn Stories format and to catapult your ad straight to the top of every mobile phone, right there next to their favorite content creator on LinkedIn.
That’s a very desirable placement from an advertiser's perspective. Most people’s attention span declines over prolonged use of social media apps and they might just miss your ad somewhere down the newsfeed.
Because of its prominent placement, LinkedIn Stories Ads can capture your target audience’s attention the moment they open the LinkedIn app on their phone.
Creating Your First LinkedIn Story
Before we begin creating your first LinkedIn Story, I want you to understand that you can only share LinkedIn Stories on your LinkedIn mobile phone app.
Now, that this is out of the way, you have two choices when it comes to creating the content for your LinkedIn Story. You can start on your computer, or go straight to your phone.
The same dimensions work for videos too. Just create a short 20-second clip in Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere, or Davinci Resolve, and then send the final clip to your phone.
On your phone, open the LinkedIn mobile app. Click on the top left corner, the round circle with your avatar with a little + icon next to it to start.
Next, you have to decide if you want to start with a photo or video from your media library, or if you want to record something on the spot.
If you want to start with your media library, that’s where you would select the photos and videos you created on your computer.
Adding text to your LinkedIn story
The text sticker is located in the top right corner. Tap on the little t icon and you can choose different colors and write whatever you want on your story.
Stickers also work for videos. So if you are moving around a lot in your video, make sure that you watch it to the end to select the best location to place your text sticker (or any other stickers) so you're not covering your face by accident. 🤦
Adding external links with the swipe-up feature to your LinkedIn story
As you are creating your story, you’ll see a little chain that allows you to attach a link to your story. That's the swipe-up feature. It’s named by LinkedIn as a “See More” button at the bottom of your story.
You can also add a swipe-up to your LinkedIn profile to get them to check out what you do—but make sure you've updated your LinkedIn headline and polished up your profile to set up the perfect first impression.
Always make sure that you include a swipe-up for each story and link to something relevant, even if you're not promoting something specific at the moment. If you can't find anything fitting, just link to one of your most popular content pieces
Here are some other ideas, a link to one of your signup forms on your website, your YouTube channel, your latest TikTok video, or your bio link.
It's another way how you can get people to engage with your most profitable content.
Adding stickers on your LinkedIn story
To add stickers to your story, you have to click on the icon at the top right that looks as if someone is peeling off… well a sticker… It will open up a new menu that offers you a range of attachments for your story.
The @Mention sticker allows you to tag any person or company page on LinkedIn. If you use this sticker, they’ll receive a notification when your LinkedIn Story is published.
The Clock sticker will display your current local time.
The Community and Events stickers and the Current Status stickers work the same and are what you would expect to see if you ever used Instagram Stories.
Sadly, there are no animated stickers yet and the stick design feels very old-fashioned and outdated. But hey, better than no stickers, right? 😉
Hopefully, we'll see some of these on LinkedIn Stories very soon...
If you want to have prettier stickers you can either wait, make your voice heard on LinkedIn, or simply use Instagram to design your story. Then save it to your media library and import it into your LinkedIn Story! Boom! You’re set!
If you want to move the sticker, rest one finger on your sticker and then move it. If you want to rotate or resize stickers, simply click on a sticker and then make a circle with your two-finger gestures, or pull/push your fingers apart/together. You know the drill…
How to Archive LinkedIn Stories?
Next, archiving. Can you archive LinkedIn Stories? Yes and no!
Now let's start by comparing it to how Instagram does it. It’s sophisticated 😉😉
You can change the settings to make sure that all of your stories will be automatically saved to your media library for keepsake but also your stories will be automatically archived (by Instagram) and can be accessed indefinitely.
You also have the ability to pin any of your stories to a Highlight that would be featured on your profile itself. This will make them permanently available to anyone visiting your profile. Highlights are a really cool feature!
You can create different names, create different icons for some of the highlights and people can go through all of your content all the way back with years and years of interesting stories that you don't want to discard on Instagram.
However, LinkedIn does it differently. (Probably like the historical version of Instagram Stories when it first came along.)
First of all, after 24 hours, your stories get deleted permanently. There is no archive. There are no highlights. No automatic saving of your LinkedIn Stories. But… there is a workaround.
You can go and open your stories and then click on the three dots at the top right-hand corner. Open up this menu where a download button will show up. To archive your stories locally, you have to diligently click the Download button
If you ever forget it and didn't create any backup on your computer, the story will be gone forever.
So it's really important to take note of this and cultivate the habit of archiving each and every one of your stories in case you want to use them again at a later time.
LinkedIn Stories Privacy
If you're wondering who can see your stories, the answer is very simple. The same people who can view your LinkedIn profile can see your LinkedIn Stories.
So if you set your LinkedIn profile to private, only your direct connections can see your stories. If your profile is public – and that’s what I always recommend if you want to use LinkedIn as a business – anyone who follows you can see your stories.
If you want to know who viewed your LinkedIn Story, you can simply open your story within 24 hours of posting to explore individual LinkedIn profiles.
If you don’t want to show up in someone else’s LinkedIn Story analytics, you can open your LinkedIn settings and change your LinkedIn Story viewing options under Visibility.
LinkedIn Stories Analytics – How to Measure the Success of Your LinkedIn Stories
At this time, LinkedIn doesn’t offer any analytics for LinkedIn Stories.
You can only see the number of people and their individual LinkedIn profiles by clicking on one of your LinkedIn Stories within 24 hours of sharing.
If you want to track your results, for example in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet, I recommend always posting at the exact same time and then set yourself a recurring alarm 30 minutes before posting to record yesterday’s results.
How Many People Are Using LinkedIn Stories?
Unfortunately, LinkedIn hasn’t published any information about the global adaption of LinkedIn Stories yet. We all would love to know...
- How many people are creating LinkedIn Stories?
- How many LinkedIn Stories have been created this year?
- How many people are watching stories?
- And how many people swiped up on a LinkedIn Story?
- Or replied via a direct message?
I will update this article once the information becomes available.
LinkedIn Stories Strategy
Before we dive into your LinkedIn Stories strategy, I want you to think about something really important… Who do you want to see your LinkedIn Stories?
Once you have a clear answer to this you will be able to develop a laser-focused content strategy to attract ideal prospects, getting them interested in you and your products and building a real relationship with them.
The best way to achieve this is by sharing, small, bite-sized value-bombs, for example, actionable tips that they can implement immediately or that give them an instant a-ha moment.
The reason why this strategy works is simple... If you share valuable information, viewers will not skip over your LinkedIn Stories. That tells the LinkedIn algorithm, that your stories are valuable and as a consequence, your LinkedIn Stories receive a more prominent placement before other people’s stories.
It also helps your audience to build the necessary trust to move from prospect to customer.
Most people need several touch points before they make a buying decision. LinkedIn Stories are a great way to create a lot of touchpoints, especially because of the prominent placement right at the top of the LinkedIn mobile app.
I recommend starting by sharing one LinkedIn Story per day, for at least a week, and then slowly increasing the number of LinkedIn Stories up to 5 per day.
This works best because it slowly introduces a new habit, instead of overwhelming you after day 3, which might lead to abandoning the implementation of LinkedIn Stories altogether.
What else can you do?
Well, if you want to learn how to map out your entire LinkedIn strategy, in a simple, step-by-step system, then have a look at my LinkedIn Accelerator Program with more than 8+ hours worth of LinkedIn strategies and tactics.
