Though I love LinkedIn, I was disappointed that it wasn’t living up to its potential. LinkedIn had been missing out on an opportunity to serve as a rich professional platform for individuals and the right place for companies to maintain a detailed representation of who they are and what they do.
So, in the beginning of this month, I was delighted to learn LinkedIn rolled out new Company Pages, enabling businesses to develop more robust Company Pages and possess more control over those pages. You can see the announcement on LinkedIn’s blog. Following is some information to help you take advantage of these new features right now.
Basic New Features Description
Before I launch into this section, I would like to give a special thanks to one of my newer social media team members, Danielle Cormier, for her research and contributions to this column.
Setting up a company page is free and the news is that LinkedIn added tabs that businesses will be able to populate with information at will: Careers and Products & Services. (Companies were able to add more features like Careers to their pages previously, but there was a cost and it was not sold through their ad sales reps.)
On Company Pages, administrators can add content to the Products & Services tab and each brand will have a greater extent of control over what is displayed on their pages. These various products’ lists will be able to be showcased dependent upon which industry category your LinkedIn account is a part of. Businesses can also modify their pages to display the strongest recommendations to prospective customers in an attempt to exhibit the trust in their brand and accelerate the growth of their product.
Companies can also add videos of products and services to their pages and feature particular products more prominently than others. In turn, LinkedIn members can recommend and review a product or service on a company profile and their recommendations will surface on their own profiles as well. Company Pages will list the people who have recommended a particular product as well.
LinkedIn launched the new pages featuring 40 major companies and announced that company page administrators would be able to update their pages in the coming weeks. Here are some examples of the new pages for Liberty Mutual, AT&T, Dell, and Microsoft.
Setting Up Your Page
The process of adding to your company’s page is simple:
- Find your company page here.
- Click on one of the new tabs (Careers or Products & Services) and click the add button.
You must be a confirmed administrator/employee of the company. If you do not have access to your page as an administrator, you can check the LinkedIn Help Section and click “How do I edit a Company Profile?”
While Facebook is all the rage, there is a lot more utility and opportunity in this B2B network then is being surfaced right now. Although I have merged my professional and personal life on Facebook, here is real value in a strictly professional networking site. So I hope LinkedIn will continue to grow and succeed and I look forward to its future innovation.
This article was originally published on ClickZ.