• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 12, 2020

LinkedIn on Tuesday launched a live streaming events platform that combines existing resources such as Pages, Events, and Live to help companies reconnect with their customers and communities.

Combining the three products helps to host Live Events on LinkedIn Pages with help from third-party broadcast providers such as Restream, Wirecast, Streamyard and Socialive. More options will be added in the coming months. 

LinkedIn accelerated its product roadmap to tighten the integration between LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, turning these two products into a new virtual events tool that enables companies to connect with their customers and communities for free.

During the beta process, one company hosted a live fashion show and then sliced the videos into clips, posting them on LinkedIn, said Rishi Jobanputra, senior director product management at LinkedIn. “It’s one example of taking an event that otherwise would have happened in person and creating a virtual experience,” he said. “Another is that our head of editorial, Dan Roth, interviewed Mark Cuban, discussing what will happen with the state of the economy and the future, given COVID.”

The tool creates an interactive experience, where attendees can ask questions and the presenter can comment or answer questions.

Companies can promote events to Page followers and send direct invitations to connections, but they also can reach out to target audiences outside of their network with paid targeting and ads.

Thousands of attendees can view the stream live, but the Video tab -- a dedicated hub for organic content on the Page -- can help to extend the life of the content. 

The content will live on the company’s LinkedIn page. Brands can use clips from the live-streaming session to create ads or marketing messages on other platforms, repurposing the content.

LinkedIn has not yet enabled the ability to tag words in the video content of the live stream, which would improve search capabilities across the platform.

Advanced tag features in YouTube videos, for example, allow those searching for specific content to find a word within the posted videos -- a feature that could become very helpful in LinkedIn Live videos once they are hosted on the company’s Page.

Brands could then optimize the videos for those words to serve up in Bing, LinkedIn, or Google search results. The content is viewable outside of LinkedIn, even if the person is not logged into the platform.

“The search team is always exploring ways to make content easily accessible,” Jobanputra said. “The idea to put in a few keywords to find something specific is interesting.”