LinkedIn: which Type of Cover Story Video is Right for You?

My name is Toma Kobozeva, I am a curator of educational projects and product manager of BEsmart. In this article I summarized my experience in Cover Story Video in order to make it easier for you to navigate in possible formats, choose your own option and see how differently the same tool can be used.

Our team is crazy about communication and the events happening around public speaking so we're constantly looking for new needs and formats to work with and improve.

Recently, a new LinkedIn profile feature caught our attention – the ability to record a 30-second video presentation about yourself. Read more about this update and why you need it.

I set out to explore this feature and over the course of week-long research, I looked at many different variations of the cover video. And today I want to share my observations and talk about the main types of videos that I was able to identify during the research.

Sufficiently personal, funny stories, whose purpose is to cause sympathy, to make the audience closer. People talk about their work in an unusual way, tell jokes, use animation and unexpected facts. The main task is to please the audience and create an image of yourself as a real person – with a sense of humor, hobbies, passion about work and life.

The main goal is to present yourself as an expert. The target audience may be both the company's HR stuff and the actual future clients. Therefore, I have distinguished two subtypes here:

There is an emphasis on work experience and skills, answering the question "why am I a cool expert and how can I be useful?"

Here you highlight your understanding of requests and sell a perfect potential match to the client, answering the questions "who can I help, what exactly can I give, why am I the best option for you?"

These are a mixed type of videos without a clear bias toward any of the focus areas. The content of such stories is mostly about onboarding visitors to the page – "nice to see you, you can find this here, if you want to cooperate – read this, if you want to work with me – write or call, I'm open to such and such proposals, etc.". The purpose of such videos is to give brief instructions on how to use your page to different categories of visitors with different goals more effectively.

The smallest type, but occasionally encountered. The purpose of such videos is to highlight a specific product, event, discount – something that is relevant and important right now. This option is suitable for the profiles of companies or organizations, or for a personal profile with high attendance rate.