LinkedIn for Business is Changing: How it affects you

LinkedIn has notified the masses that business pages are about to undergo some changes. Gone are the products and services tabs that companies have used to generate interest in their offerings. The necessity of strategic thinking has become more important than ever... so how are you going to make this change work for you?

Share updates... often

You are retaining the ability to share content through page updates. These updates will go out to all of the people that follow your page. You can continue to build your following by posting your page as your employer on your personal profiles, by sharing content from your page into groups and by adding the follow button from LinkedIn on your company website.

When you are sharing content on your company page make sure that you cover a few key components:

1. Valuable sentence of information in the meta description of the page that you are sharing.

2. Featured image for the page that you are sharing.

3. A post with text that doesn't imitate the sentence in the meta description of the page that positions your link as valuable.

With those three easy steps your content will be worthy of some eyeballs, and in return for great content you hope to achieve some likes and comments that will keep it alive in the newsfeeds of your connections and their connections!

Showcase pages

These are a little different than the product pages, but they offer way better functionality and will be the product or service push that you might have been looking for. While they aren't brand new, they are under-utilized (my guess as to why the elimination of the other pages all together). According to LinkedIn these pages are going to positively impact your activity on their site because:

1. Showcase Pages were built for exactly this purpose – to let you highlight a particular brand or product line.
2. They make it easy to build a dedicated community on LinkedIn and start an ongoing conversation about that product or brand.
3. Showcase Page followers know to expect news about your product or service – in fact, they’re looking forward to it! And since Showcase Page updates work just like company updates, they offer all of the benefits detailed above.

Here is what Showcase Pages currently look like for Microsoft:

The major perk that I see with this change is their prominence on the "homepage" of your brand on LinkedIn. So instead of navigating to tabs, the visitor is able to see your products and services more easily. In my opinion, very positive change.

So for those of you that are currently managing a plethora of pages or are simply handling your own, connect with us to make your page exciting and relevant. Our social media experts will create content, manage your engagement and track your social success. Ready to boost your social media presence? Let's talk!