Big Changes Coming to LinkedIn Company Pages – Here’s What You Should Do

Lauren Owens - March 28, 2014

This week, LinkedIn announced big changes to its Company Pages. As of April 14, its Products & Services tabs are going away. With them, unfortunately, are the individual Products & Services recommendations, circled in red below.

LinkedIn is giving companies until April 14 to copy their recommendations (via a simple copy and paste) in order to preserve them for future use. To access them, click into your recommendations (the word recommendations is hyperlinked), and copy and paste any recommendations you want to preserve, making sure to capture the name, title and company of the individual recommending your product or service:

LinkedIn is quick to point out that if you want to use these recommendations in promotional or marketing materials, you should request permission from the individual. We recommend doing just that.

Once you have permission, you can repurpose these recommendations on your website, or use them on other social media channels, perhaps using one of the image creation tools highlighted here. For example:

What’s Next for LinkedIn Company Pages?

While LinkedIn isn’t replacing the Products & Services tabs with any other feature, they do recommend using Showcase Pages to highlight what they call “prominent products and services,” and making better use of Company Updates (the feature within LinkedIn that allows you to post more current content ala Facebook Posts.)

Showcase Pages are individual pages designed to target specific audiences. There are pros and cons to using Showcase Pages, the primary benefit being the ability to target your message to a niche audience; the primary drawback, of course, is cultivating unique audiences around your individual products or services and creating ongoing content for those audiences.

Whether or not you should create a Showcase Page depends on many factors, including whether or not your business has unique enough products and services to grow a distinct audience around. But this is another post for another time.

In a future post, we’ll take a closer look at LinkedIn Showcase Pages. For now, make sure you get the recommendations off of your Products & Services tab before they go away – you’ve got about 20 days to do so.