A major vibe shift is behind Oktopost’s recent acquisition of Milk Video: the boom of short-form vertical video on LinkedIn.
Those on TikTok have already heard the gospel about short clips.
Oktopost, a social media management platform, is hoping to bring the good news to the world of B2B marketing.
The software will integrate Milk’s video editing tool right into its own platform. Social media managers will be able to upload recordings into Oktopost, which will use Milk’s proprietary technology to chop it up into bite-sized snippets that employees can share on their own feeds.
And it’s not just pure conjecture. According to VP of Business Development Colin Day, the acquisition is a bet on LinkedIn’s future.
“I went out to San Francisco and had some meetings with the LinkedIn executive team focused on consumer content creation,” Day told Vendelux. “Through that conversation, it became very clear that a lot of emphasis, investment and focus is being put into short-form video, and being a certified partner of LinkedIn, we wanted to get right back to being a part of that journey.”
Video on LinkedIn is being watched 36% more compared to last year, according to a blog post by the site’s senior director of product, Lakshman Somasundaram. People are also posting more, with videos growing at twice the rate of other original post formats.
LinkedIn did not immediately respond to questions from Vendelux.
It’s the perfect marriage, according to Day, who says Oktopost was built on the premise that the B2B world runs on trust. What better way to nurture that trust than with well-edited clips of real people who work at your company.
“Every B2B organization has a great interest in having their employees post content on their own social networks,” said CEO Daniel Kushner. “It amplifies the businesses message in a much wider way. The sum of the employees’ networks is larger, and it positions the employees as thought leaders in the industry.”
A Feedback Loop That Saves Time
The B2B world is saturated with long-form content that can drone on for hours. Think webinars, conference speeches and podcast episodes.
Someone in the marketing team is then responsible for taking that video and slicing it up into digestible pieces—if they do it at all.
“Today, that process is very cumbersome,” Kushner said. “And in releasing content, time is of the essence.”
Milk Video, founded in 2020, uses AI to help edit and caption videos into ready-to-post files.
Oktopost isn’t just buying the company outright. It’s fully integrating the technology into its own software, turning Oktopost into an indispensable one-stop shop for social media marketers.
“When you combine that tech with the social media management platform, it creates a loop,” Kushner said. “When you post through Oktopost, you can see the metrics, and that data goes back to the Oktopost platform, so the next time Milk generates a video, it takes that into consideration.”
When Day and his team built a roadmap for Oktopost’s future, they asked themselves what gaps they needed to fill to keep the platform interesting.
After talking to LinkedIn, the path became obvious.
“They’re making some changes to the algorithm, to the ad capabilities, and building solutions around short-form video. We need to think about what we’re doing, from a platform perspective, to support that movement and trend,” he said. “I went out and did some research and found Milk Video.”
As part of the acquisition, the team at Milk will not continue on the journey with Oktopost.
“For us, it was the quickest path to release,” Kushner said. “Take the tech, embed it into the product and let our customers start getting value ASAP.”
In a statement, Milk Video CEO Ross Cranwell praised the purchase as a natural next step.
“We built Milk Video to help businesses harness the power of video without the traditional complexities of video production,” he said. “Oktopost’s deep commitment to B2B marketing makes them the perfect partner to take our vision to the next level, helping companies scale their video strategies with ease.”
Patching the ‘Black Hole’ of Social Media Analytics
Oktopost was founded in 2013 by Kushner and Liad Guez, both of whom came from B2B marketing backgrounds.
At the time, Kushner saw a growing need for social media analytics.
“Investing in events and online ads and webinars—it’s not rocket science to show that flow and to understand that ROI,” he said. “On social media, we saw a black hole.”
He added: “We saw we were getting likes and shares and comments, but it was impossible to translate those metrics into business value, and when you’re not able to do that, you won’t get more in budget.”
After an $800,000 seed round, the duo set on building the “only social media management platform which is dedicated 100 percent to B2B organizations.”
The platform includes a scheduling calendar for various social media accounts, along with a dashboard that helps measure and analyze how the content is performing.
Current customers include DHL, Capco, AllianceBernstein and Everest Group.
The company is headquartered in Israel, with outposts in London and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It currently has about 90 employees, according to Kushner.
