If you are in the B2B industry, we assume that you are already familiar with what an excellent tool LinkedIn can be for your leads, connections, networking, and other B2B communications to benefit your company’s brand and exposure through the professional social network. However, you may not be as familiar with a relatively new feature that LinkedIn has offered since late 2013, Company Showcase Pages. Each company can design up to 10 LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages in addition to your regular LinkedIn Company Profile page.
If you miss the products and services feature that was removed, then these pages are a great way to showcase the products of services that your company offers. However, LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages are quite a bit broader in scope and you can use them for a number of different ways to promote your business through your LinkedIn channel and network in addition to detailing your company’s products and services.
LinkedIn explains a Showcase page as way to “extend you Company Page presence and focus your message to engage specific audiences.” Three main objectives for Company Showcase Pages are:
- Create a dedicated page for each aspect of your business with its own message to share and audience to share with.
- Give LinkedIn members a chance to follow the aspects of your business they value most.
- Share focused content to build a relationship with your specific audiences.
Ideas for LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages
- Highlight sales, list top selling items, or detail special offers. Our top selling item is gopromotional pens, so we would definitely want to feature a page about all of the different styles of pens we offer to our clients.
- Feature the charities your company has chosen to work with or tell your audience all about your local community outreach programs.
- Design a page for each department or specialty your company has. That department manager can then take over that page using the management assignment features available through the company showcase pages platform.
- Target very specific audiences or customers based on their preferences or even language. You can write LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages in any language. The beauty of social networks that reach across all the countries in the world is being able to communicate with a target audience that is a world away. Normally companies might use a translation service to write information about their products in services in other languages on their website, but very infrequently do you see companies targeting other countries and consumers that speak other languages through this type of niche social marketing. It can be very effective when it is done right.
- Assign employees to feature their favourite products on their own LinkedIn Company Showcase Page.
- Include seasonal merchandise features. For example, during the rainy season, we highlight promotional umbrellas and might create a page about that. During the summer, we might feature branded fans or branded sun visors.
How to Set Up a LinkedIn Company Showcase Page
Setting you’re your own LinkedIn Company Showcase Page is very simple. Just follow the step by step tutorial we have written for you here and your page will be created in 7 easy steps (or less) within minutes.
Step 1: Log into your LinkedIn account and navigate to your LinkedIn Company Page. Click on the edit button and then click “Create a Showcase Page”. See the screen shot below.
Step 2: The next step is to choose a descriptive name for the page. Remember that this can show up in LinkedIn’s search feature, so be as descriptive as possible and use important keywords that describe your page and are important for your brand.
Step 3: Probably my favourite feature of the LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages is that you can add a different administrator for each Company Showcase Page. This means that the person who is a specialist in this area can maintain it. It also means that different people can run their own Company Showcases Pages without needing to have access to your entire LinkedIn Company Page. If you choose to skip this optional step now, you can always go back and edit it later. You can add and remove Showcase Page managers at any time.
Step 4: The next step is to add an image that represents this page and a description of up to 200 characters. Again, keywords help with the search function so be sure to use all 200 characters.
Step 5: This step is also optional; you can select different default language for this Company Showcase Page. As we explained above, this gives you the opportunity to hyper-target certain parts of your market and really speaks to that target audience in their own language. Once again, the ability to assign a different page administrator allows you to have someone proficient in the language you choose to run this page and engage with that target audience in the appropriate language.
Step 6: If you offer sponsored content, you can enable and list that information during this step of the LinkedIn Company Showcase Page set up process. This step is optional.
Step 7: The last step is to upload your company logo so that this page is still associated with your brand and your company. It helps for quick and easy brand recognition, so this is an important step. The logo should match the one you have on your regular LinkedIn Company Page and all other LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages as well.
Takeaways for Your Company
Many companies are adding social media to their mix. Trying out this little known feature of LinkedIn helps you establish your brand, highlight your niche, and better communicate with your target audience. Being able to customize and detail your own Company Showcase Pages on LinkedIn is an excellent way to help your company stand out in your B2B social communications on that network. You should also remember to link to each of your company’s LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages from your blog and all other social channels to help with cross promotion and increase your reach and exposure. Use different ideas for each of your 10 LinkedIn Company Showcase Pages and you will diversify your messaging and appeal to even more of your target audience and customer base.
