Goodbye Product Pages

LinkedIn, always focused on the B2B community, has continued to enhance their company pages, encouraging businesses to update their status frequently. Unlike Facebook, status updates are actually delivered into the timeline of everyone who follows the page.

While LinkedIn has streamlined the Company Page, they have let both the Product and Service Pages languish. Now we know why. The Product Pages will be discontinued on April 14.

Since they haven’t been an effective traffic driver for us or our clients, we won’t miss them. LinkedIn is suggesting you take a few minutes for some clean up work before they are gone for good. If you have any testimonials or recommendations, be sure to copy them into a document so you can use those valuable comments elsewhere in your marketing.

Get ready for the new Showcase Pages.

What Are LinkedIn Showcase Pages?

LinkedIn Showcase Pages are a way for you to talk to smaller segments of your target market about the things they are most interested in. If you have multiple products and services, you can create separate pages for each under the main umbrella corporate page.

Showcase Pages are different than LinkedIn landing pages in these ways:

  • Showcase Pages have a larger banner
  • Businesses can advertise and buy sponsored updates
  • Employee profiles cannot be associated with an individual Showcase Page
  • All Showcase Pages link directly back to the business page
  • They have a two-column layout for content posts
  • You will be able to post status updates to each Showcase Page
  • There are no careers, products or services tabs at the top of the page

Showcase Strategy

Microsoft has put each of their major products into Showcase Pages off of the main company page. This allows their social media personnel to manage messaging for different audiences on a product by product basis.

For instance, a user who is interested in following the latest software developments for Excel can follow that page without having to fill their feed with content from the main Microsoft LinkedIn page. The same strategy is applied across the Office product suite so content producers know exactly who they are targeting.

Showcase Pages are a convenient way to roll out audience-sensitive or highly targeted messaging to your different consumer groups without having to maintain different accounts across multiple LinkedIn landing pages.

Want to learn more? We will be talking about Showcase Pages and all things LinkedIn on April 29. Seating is limited- reserve your seat today.