LinkedIn Sees a Future as a Robust Content Marketing Platform, Plans to Deploy In-Stream Ads
The social network for professionals that is LinkedIn continues to thrive. On Thursday the company announced that in the fourth quarter of 2012, it raked in $303.6 million in revenue and $11.5 million in net income, notching adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 35 cents. The revenue reflected an 81 percent surge from the same quarter in the previous year, and LinkedIn destroyed analysts’ expectations of 19 cents per share on $280 million in revenue. Unsurprisingly, LNKD started Friday up about 19.5 percent.
In the earnings call, CEO Jeff Weiner said, “One of the things that we’re increasingly focused on in 2013 is going to be the opportunity to support content marketing.”
The company appears ready to leverage its huge audience of people and companies to craft a content machine, one that builds off the success of LinkedIn Today and LinkedIn Influencers.
Weiner also mentioned that he saw LinkedIn being a professional publishing platform in the future, a place where exclusive content will make the site stickier.
And that’s not the end of LinkedIn’s plans with content. The company plans to insert sponsored content in users’ activity streams. Weiner said the company has been running internal tests of these in-stream ads for the past few months. These units, similar to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, would allow companies to pay to promote their content to a designated group of followers.
Clearly, businesses that haven’t really tapped into LinkedIn now have even more incentive to get started.
LinkedIn, which owns SlideShare, announced last month that it boasts more than 200 million members from more than 200 countries and territories.
In mid-January, the social network announced that it was shutting down LinkedIn Answers on Jan. 31. “We will be focusing our efforts on the development of new and more engaging ways to share and discuss professional topics across LinkedIn,” the company said in an email to users at the time. The company’s now-known content plans appear to be in line with that push.
