LinkedIn is going all in on B2B creators

^{Making a living as a creator shouldn’t be some elusive thing. And what’s the best way to learn how creators are making it work? To go behind-the-scenes. These bi-weekly interview issues are like having coffee with your favorite creators. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about solopreneurship and the creator economy.}

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LinkedIn is certainly having a moment. Post-Elon’s Twitter takeover, the business masses have migrated to LinkedIn in recent years. 

Last week, LinkedIn launched Creator Marketplace, a new section within its ad platform to help advertisers identify creators relevant to their industries and ideal audience. 

Creators can opt in to share their content with brands and showcase their top posts. Advertisers can feature their brands through ads or connect with the creators directly to explore partnerships, such as sponsored content, speaking engagements, advisory roles, and consulting projects. 

This is an exciting move for creators, as it opens up monetization streams for micro niches, not just the big categories. LinkedIn’s Director of Product, Sam Corrao Clanon told Insider that businesses will be looking for subject matter experts to speak credibly to their experience with their product – versus opting for the cheapest CPMs. 

This also comes at a time where LLM citations are in the zeitgeist and new research shows LinkedIn accounts for 33% of the sources ChatGPT cites and 22% for Google’s AI Overview. The people who can create communities and sub-cultures around brands have never been more important. 

Creators have made LinkedIn cool, and it’s paying off for creators to be on the platform. You only need to look at this year’s Cannes Lions agenda to see all the B2B creators. 

Nicole Ramirez, who chatted with Curious Creator last year, is one such creator. She’s been leveraging LinkedIn as a B2B creator before the Marketplace was a thing. 

Ramirez has been able to attract partnerships with brands like Canva to collaborate on their annual report on the marketing industry. She said LinkedIn only started being able to label posts as brand partnerships about two years ago, because it wasn’t a thing on the platform before. 

“A lot of B2B brands are leaning in and there are LinkedIn influencer agencies popping up. Creator Authority run by Brendan Gahan is one that I’m part of. He saw this opportunity to lean into thought leaders to match them with B2B brands.” 

“I’ve had people say to me they didn’t even realize that certain posts were brand partnerships because it sounds just like my content. I make sure that I’m working with brands that I already use and that I have authority over what I’m saying, so it doesn’t sound like an ad,” she said. 

Other creators we’ve spoken to Curious Creator are also going brand side, even if they started out as OG Instagram influencers. Elise Swopes got poached by Adobe to basically do what she was doing for herself, but internally. “We’ll see more brands hiring creators to help them understand where the creator economy is going and to be an internal support,” she said. These types of roles are part-influencer, part-advisor. 

As AI continues to proliferate platforms, the trusted voices who have their finger on the pulse of the culture, will become a stronger part of a brand’s budget – whether via platform marketplace like LinkedIn’s or directly, through a DM. 

Watch this space.

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Amanda

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