How LinkedIn Trending News Timelines Are Reimagining the Quest for B2B Earned Media

By: Clayton Durant, Senior Manager of Emerging Media and Jenny Chang, Senior Director of Media Relations, MikeWorldWide??

Media relations professionals have been navigating one of the most complex media landscapes since the dawn of the internet blog, defined by a surplus of content, a consolidation of media, and an attention economy that has consumers stretched thin. Now audience habits have changed even more drastically, with non-traditional platforms and content frameworks reimagining how news is viewed and consumed. This year, Pew Research found that a growing number of millennial and Gen-Z audiences are discovering their news via TikTok, forcing media outlets like The Wall Street Journal to leverage short form video in their content strategy.??

These consumption changes have ultimately impacted the bottom line of both large and small news organizations, giving advertising juggernauts such as Google even more leverage as the war between platforms and media outlets wages on for share of brand advertising and marketing budgets. Unfortunately, for media relations professionals and journalists alike, platforms are earning most of the ad revenue pie. As it stands, Google’s most recent Q3 earnings report noted the platform drove $54.48 billion in total revenue whereas Conde Nast is expecting to exceed slightly above $2 billion in total revenue by the end of the year.??

This disparity has pushed more than a 1,000 journalists and media professionals to lose their jobs at outlets including Gannett, CNN, and VOX this year alone, creating two key issues for media relations professionals to navigate. First, journalists are being forced to take on more coverage responsibility, moving from covering 3 beats on average to 4.

On the flip side, more than half of PR professionals agree that the biggest hurdle continues to be getting responses from journalists and securing earned media coverage. On top of that, earned media is still defined as placing a client's news, executives, or announcements in top tier, local, or trade outlets via print or online. This limiting definition of what earned is can explain why agencies and brands believe the media “shelf space” for placing earned stories has shrunk.??

However, at MikeWorldWide, we see this disruption as an opportunity with the ultimate belief that media “shelf space” has never been bigger, especially for B2B brands. Our optimism stems from the growth and emergence of LinkedIn beyond a professional social media platform to an aggregator of news content that by size and scale drives more readership and engagement than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg combined. Simply put, in this new media relations environment, platforms are as powerful as publications.?

So how does LinkedIn act as a media outlet? Well, in 2017 LinkedIn launched trending storylines which was a short collection of editorially selected news stories that would be shared across users' timelines to inform the global LinkedIn community of important news. Today, that feature is called LinkedIn News which is run by an editorial team that has grown to 100+ individual staff, working across 15 regions. Not only are these timelines curations of top news but they feature commentary from LinkedIn users known as “editors picks” - which for comparative sake is the equivalent to a quote in a top tier outlet. These editorial picks highlight LinkedIn commentary from the most credible users ranging from CEOs to educators (and anyone in between) who offer relevant and interesting viewpoints on a specific story giving those included an opportunity to have their commentary viewed by millions in a matter of hours.??

For B2B brands, earning a spot in LinkedIn trending timelines creates an entirely new set of opportunities for raising the visibility of executives and brands, with limited constraints compared to traditional media relations. Additionally, LinkedIn trending timelines provide a deeper dive into the data and insights that matter most to communication and marketing professionals. From reach, impressions, to demographics – the transparent data LinkedIn provides its content creators is unparalleled compared to the level of data and insights traditional media offers communication and marketing professionals. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, these editors' pick gives those who are featured a direct pathway to build an ownable audience at scale which for many marketers has become table stakes in the way they value PR agencies and the PR profession more broadly.?

As you move forward with your B2B media relations efforts, we encourage you all to think about how LinkedIn and other emerging platforms can complement traditional earned tactics. The landscape may be changing, but the opportunities to drive earned have never been more plentiful as platforms create new, untapped, and limitless opportunities for brands and their spokespeople to engage.??