Picture of headphones and a phone on a wallet to illustrate a LinkedIn audio event

One of the things I love as a built environment marketer is trying new things. As a marketer, I often use my own activity as a testbed for experimentation, it’s fun, it means I’m always learning and keeps me interested, an added bonus.

Plus, and this is a big one for me, it means that I can advise my clients from a point of experience rather than just theory. And to me that’s something that is invaluable.

I’ve been doing a monthly live called the B2B Comms Breakdown on the third Friday of the month with my content partner in crime Stacey Meadwell. On a recent LinkedIn Live which was about the ‘Hidden Features of LinkedIn’ which included a discussion about LinkedIn Audio which we’d both never actually tried.

So, it made sense that we decided to try it out for our next live event, which happened in March. Here’s a quick rundown of what worked and what didn’t and as it’s LinkedIn Audio we sadly cannot share a recording, one of our biggest flaws/bugbears.

What is LinkedIn Audio?

LinkedIn Live Audio is a way to broadcast live, audio-only to your LinkedIn profile as an event. You can invite people ‘up on stage’ as speakers, have discussions with co-hosts on a particular topic or theme. They can be live straight away or scheduled for a future date that people can sign up for an add to their calendars. You can invite the audience to ask their questions like a live, interactive podcast.

Why does no one know about LinkedIn Audio?

LinkedIn is notoriously bad at telling people about its features. It banks on you stumbling across new ones if you click on the magic three dots in the top right-hand navigation of a feature. But so many people don’t even know about the three dots, let alone clicking on them. The other alternatives are that you are following a LinkedIn influencer who shares what’s new – Kevin D Turner is great to follow for new features and he even tracks them throughout the year. and a whole new world tends to be unlocked.

This means that loads of people, particularly in the built environment sector where we’d not the fastest adopters of tech of any type, don’t know that the audio feature exists.

I ran a poll on LinkedIn and most people either hadn’t used it or didn’t know it existed.

Key reflections on co-hosting a LinkedIn Audio event

LinkedIn Audio has a much more casual feel

It’s like having a chat, and felt a bit more relaxed than we do our LinkedIn Lives on camera. Plus, I found it far less pressured. Just had to set up my mic really, so it was quick and easy – no worry about lighting or mess in the background.

Your audience can join the conversation

I love the fact that you can invite people to join you on stage to share their experiences and to pose questions in their own words. It was one of the things I used to love about Clubhouse, and it’s nice to be able to draw on the expertise and views of others. By being able to include others is a lovely part of LinkedIn audio – it gave a much richer conversation and I learnt from more people.

There are no replays as you can’t record

For us, we’re huge fans of repurposing where we create social media clips from our lives and create long-form blogs from the transcripts, and we also reshare the recording. It’s important as many of our audience can’t always make our sessions live, so recordings mean they can catch up at a time that suits them.

Recording workarounds aren’t straight forward

As you can’t record LinkedIn Audio, the benefits from lives as mentioned above are scuppered. I tested out lots of workarounds but many just resulted in me only recording my own audio or meant that if I clicked somewhere I lost connection all round. So, we went for the workaround where my virtual assistant recorded it via her digital recorder and a cable into the headphone output – a third party solution isn’t really ideal for regular events.

There’s no way for the audience to comment

Again, another misstep is the fact that the audiences can react with emojis and gestures like clapping but there is no place to write text or comments. On LinkedIn video Lives the comment threads are a lovely way for your audience to interact with each other and ask questions so that again is missing here.

So, is LinkedIn Live Audio worth it for your marketing?

Well, my answer is that it depends on what your goals are. If you want to get more of a sense of an audio community – akin to Clubhouse then yes it may be the best option for you but if you are more into creating live content for repurposing and creating more content from the recording then LinkedIn Video Lives should be your thing.

LinkedIn Live Audio: Will It make your marketing better?