Effective April 14th, LinkedIn will no longer support “Products & Services” pages on a LinkedIn Company page. Instead, businesses with company pages will have to use the new “Showcase Pages” feature.
Before you roll your eyes over yet another change to your social media plan, Showcase Pages are a pretty awesome upgrade to the LinkedIn Company Page. Essentially, Showcase Pages allow your LinkedIn following to follow specific facets of your business. While the examples on LinkedIn show megabrands like Microsoft and Adobe, this feature also applies to smaller, B2B firms with specialized business services. For example, a business consulting firm may have multiple training courses available to different departments of a company. A Showcase page will give marketers the opportunity to brand and target each level of service to the appropriate audience.
Showcase Pages shouldn’t be a complete copy and paste of your current products or services pages on LinkedIn. Here are some components of this new feature that you’ll need to include and update:
Start first with your most popular service offerings
LinkedIn only allows ten Showcase pages per Company (and only three highlighted on your company page), so map out your service offerings in the beginning with the appropriate copy so you’re not stuck with unorganized pages.
Create your branded images in advance
A big bonus to Showcase Pages is the hero images at the top of each page that visually draw an audience in. We don’t recommend using a large version of your logo on each of these pages. For a B2B firm that doesn’t have tangible product photos, services can be represented through stock imagery or abstract icons—just remember to align it with your existing brand.
Take advantage of SEO
If your website has an existing SEO strategy, LinkedIn suggests utilizing your SEO keywords for your Showcase Page rank within search engines. Include keywords within the Showcase Page name as well as mention (when appropriate) in the page description.
Don’t abandon your content strategy
Another great feature to the Showcase Pages is each includes their own activity updates stream, allowing for you to tailor content for each pages. While it may seem like another painful step in your content upload process, this is your chance to segment ideas so not one service is receiving more attention than another. Also, be realistic about the time available to make updates. If you’re posting content daily to one channel, maybe scale back and post 2 – 3 times per week across multiple Showcase Pages.
Promote and sponsor service specific content
LinkedIn allows for tailored sponsored updates and ads to run simultaneously on multiple Sponsored Pages. That means business can efficiently run and test the same content offer across multiple pages with different copy and images depending on the audience. This allows marketers to easily analyze which audience is most interested in specific topics. Additionally, marketers can run different sponsored updates on each Showcase Page to allow for easy monitoring.
Finally, here are Showcase Page specs from LinkedIn:
- Hero Image: 974 x 330 pixels
- Logo: 100 x 60 pixels
- Square logo: 50 x 50 pixel
- Total Showcase Pages available: 10
- Two column activity feed
- Desktop, tablet and mobile accessible
