LinkedIn has seen tremendous growth on the platform over the last couple of years. They are capitalising on this unexpected growth by expanding the portfolio of tools available on the site. LinkedIn’s acquisition of Jumprope, a video creation tool/platform, is just the start of the social platform’s new goal of improving and encouraging content creation.
What is Jumprope?
Jumprope is a video platform where users can create step-by-step tutorials for skills and classes and export them directly to every social media platform. Prior to its acquisition, Jumprope described itself as ‘the best place for anyone to create a how-to and export it to every social platform’.
How does it work?
Jumprope utilises videos, still images, preset video formats and overlays in its video creation software. All of this will now be directly available on LinkedIn for their users to create video content quicker and keep the upward trend of engagement on the site going. A large part of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Learning. This is a section where users on the site can take online classes and watch video content to aid in professional skills development. With Jumprope, creators making LinkedIn Learning videos can do so more efficiently and easily directly on the site.
Why did Jumprope join LinkedIn?
Jumprope CEO, Jake Poses, said: “We started Jumprope to empower anyone to share their knowledge and passion in an engaging video-based format. But, while 2 million people per month watch Jumpropes on our platform, we realised we could build something so much bigger if we joined LinkedIn. This truly is an opportunity to fulfil the Jumprope vision of reaching a global community.”
Why did LinkedIn acquire Jumprope?
LinkedIn sees the increased growth of the platform and the recent abundance of content creation as an opportunity to move towards revenue-generation and sponsored content/ads on the platform. Social Media platforms are notoriously hard to gleam any profit from – even Twitter struggles to break even every financial year – but with a new revenue stream via monetisable video content could be a gold mine for LinkedIn. Jumprope expands the site’s video focus and encourages more content sharing on the app.
Enter a ‘Head of Community’
A big indicator for this shift-change in ethos at LinkedIn, is the recent filling of a newly created role called ‘Head of Community’. The role was designed specifically to support LinkedIn creators/influencers, establish content opportunities/connections and provide incentives to boost creator productivity. LinkedIn has made it very clear that content creation, engagement and monetisation, as a result, is the future of the platform. They are preparing for it internally with hires such as this and it won’t be long before they have a whole department dedicated to content creators.
Creator Mode
LinkedIn has also added a new ‘Creator Mode’ for user profiles. ‘Creator Mode’ gives users more ways to showcase their presence. When you activate ‘Creator Mode’, your LinkedIn profile gets an additional button called ‘Follow’ beside ‘Connect’, so your profile can start to grow an audience base as well as a network. Your profile will highlight what you talk and post about to make it easier for potential followers to make a decision. Your profile will also be more searchable and findable on the platform. ‘Creator Mode’ is a relatively new update for the site but will be continuously worked on.
Content shared on LinkedIn is up 50% year-over-year and the site is keen to keep building on that growth. LinkedIn wants to keep its top voices and profiles active. By expanding its video creation features, you encourage these top voices and profiles to stay as you improve their ease of access and provide them with great new tools to keep doing what they want to do. The creative process will feel fresh for users and add more capacity for brand partnerships and monetisation.
