In what is starting to feel like an almost daily flurry of changes, LinkedIn is at it again. On April 14, say farewell to the Products and Services tab on your LinkedIn Company Page.
Image Courtesy of Sunil Kumar www.iconbug.com
As usual, LinkedIn’s official statement regarding the change suggests that it is all about making life “more simple and efficient for members”, but I’m betting that’s not how Company Page administrators (and that includes me) are feeling about this latest change.
“At LinkedIn, we aim to provide a simple and efficient experience for our members. To do this, we’re continuously evaluating how our current products and features are used, and seeking new ways to focus our resources on building the best products. This sometimes results in the retirement of certain features. So on April 14th, the Products & Services tab will be removed from all LinkedIn Company Pages.”
What This Means for Your Business
First, page administrators have spent countless hours building and keeping fresh the product and services pages for their company. Now they need to download/copy/paste that information to a document and save it. Do it before April 14 or your information is history!
Second, administrators will have to build “Showcase Pages”, which are essentially sub-pages of the main Company Page. This information isn’t automatically transferred over, you must manually rebuild them!
While the idea of a dedicated page – limited to 10 – for your product or service sounds nice, you have to do the work to recreate them, encourage people to follow the individual pages and dedicate more resources to posting status updates on each individual Showcase Page to drive engagement and traffic to your page. Before you go creating all those Showcase Pages, be sure you understand the ongoing support that will be involved.
Third, a key strategy for most of my clients was to secure recommendations from their customers about their products and services. Guess what – recommendations now go by the wayside. Yes, you can copy them and keep for later use but no longer will people see them associated with your Company Page. Ouch.
Here’s what LinkedIn has to say about Showcase Pages:
“While Products & Services is going away, companies can get more visibility for their products and services by using Showcase Pages and Company Updates as an alternative for sharing content:
Showcase Pages allow you to extend your Company Page presence by creating a dedicated page for prominent products and services. A Showcase Page should be used for building long-term relationships with members who want to follow specific aspects of your business, and not for short-term marketing campaigns.
Company Updates are key to building relationships with your page followers. When your followers engage with your updates, it spreads your message to their networks and provides you even greater reach. Updates can be seen by your followers not just on your Company Page, but also on their newsfeed (across all devices including mobile).”
When Does It End?
I’m all for innovation and change, but at what point will individuals and companies say enough? User adoption is tough enough even for platforms as popular with B2B sellers as LinkedIn. Constant changes – without warning – put a big burden on people to continually learn new features or recreate their work and time is tight as it is. It seems to me that LinkedIn is taking a big risk in assuming that their members will continue to go along with it all.
What do you think? At what point is good, good enough? Is a revolving door on feature changes a good thing? If so, when?
UPDATE:
This morning, LinkedIn connection Steve Jones directed me to the LinkedIn help forum where there are a lot of unhappy people voicing their opinion about this change. LinkedIn doesn’t seem to care. The decision most certainly is an arbitrary one to delete member data (yes, I know you can save it, not the point). Seems to me that won’t go far in terms of instilling trust that people should use their platform to share their content. Thoughts?
Are Linkedin Big Business focused?
Linkedin Launched their showcase pages back in November 2013 stating “We worked very closely in a pilot phase with a handful of premiere companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft and HP, to build and fine-tune the product and are excited to unveil it to you today”.
http://marketing.linkedin.com/blog/advancing-relevancy-linkedin-debuts-showcase-pages/
Great that they’ve worked with some very large companies, who will no doubt have 1000’s of followers of showcase pages, but it does leave me thinking that maybe the thought process of the senior management team is on these larger companies.
I’ve long been an advocate of LinkedIn and think the platform remains the premier B2B social media platform, but with the recent introduction of Showcase, and subsequent ceasing of products pages on LinkedIn has left us with somewhat of a conundrum.
Over the years we’ve had a number of customers who have kindly written recommendation on several of our services. With the advent of Showcase, Linkedin are offering no path to migrate these comments made by LinkedIn member on Linkedin either to company pages or the new showcase pages?
Maybe this is because the number of problems being experience by LinkedIn users on the Showcase pages pages…. Or maybe because they are more interested in large companies? I’ll leave this up to you to decide!
Many small companies simply don’t the time or resource to build and maintain multiple showcase pages, (event thought at the moment you have to ask LinkedIn themselves to delete any Showcase pages).
There are some seriously annoyed people on Linkedin – see massage board, https://community.linkedin.com/questions/169353/products-and-services-pages-will-be-removed-from-c.html but it looks like LinkedIn simply don’t care.
We will continue to use LinkedIn, but this episode has shown that Linkedin maybe getting too big and caring less about the little guy.
Need to spend more time exploring Google+ perhaps?
Steve – thanks for weighing in. It certainly seems that only a smaller segment of their 230 million plus members (they love throwing those numbers around though) matter. Company pages were always awesome for smaller/mid-sized businesses as another avenue to promote what they offer. Showcase pages, in theory, sound great. The resources necessary to support them will be more than many companies will ever want to take on. I’ve been in the tech world a very long time, and I’ve seen today’s “king of the hill” be knocked off their perch. That’s what happens when you forget the people who got your company to where it is now.
I am one of the thousands that don’t understand this decision. Here’s why:
1. Showcase pages are inferior to Products and Services pages, lacking the fuller descriptions, more media options (goodbye videos), and, most importantly, Recommendations.
2. Thousands of people have invested many hours building up these pages. Many have stated they are losing faith with LI and will be reluctant to invest time in future features.
3. LinkedIn quietly posted the announcement on a blog 5-6 weeks before retirement date. Email to Admins gave less than 2 weeks notice. ouch
4. There does not seem to be much concern for member frustration, despite the fact that LinkedIn’s motto is “Members First”.
I did get a spreadsheet from LI Customer Support with all 149 Recommendations. Now if some programmer would just come up with an app to import it and auto-generate HTML so I could easily re-purpose them.
Thanks Kurt! LinkedIn says they’ve been listening to member concerns but their actions speak louder than words. They are tone deaf. More and more LinkedIn members are defecting to Google+.
I’m really going to miss the Products & Services page. Sales for Life had 70+ recommendations, and used the link to that page during our sales process. In fact, it was part of our training curriculum.
it’s really too bad, as we had to pull down the recommendations and will place on a website.
Jamie – I appreciate your comment. I’m not sure what LinkedIn is thinking but I think strategically this is a really bad move!