It’s not necessarily earth-shattering news with respect to your social media presence, but it’s a shift that should get your attention. By mid-month, LinkedIn will be “retiring” the Products & Services tabs on company pages. Any Blade Runner fans appreciate the replicant reference?
In any case, this means that you need to find new LinkedIn real estate for touting the benefits of your products and/or services. LinkedIn itself offers some options and justifications for this refinement, chief among them being the use of “your company updates for your products and/or services content.”
The logic actually speaks to a smarter way to keep what you do well in your customers’ and clients’ line of sight. In a Twitter-like way, an expected pulse of content updates on your LinkedIn status is a way to snag a slice of audience attention in a world of increasingly scattered attention spans. Having what you do parked on a static social media page does little to convey the dynamism of what you do. And in any case, isn’t that what your website is for? The whole point of a social media platform is to be, well, social.
Compare it to a cocktail party: You can only hand someone your business card once. After that, you need to start and sustain a conversation (not a monologue, mind you!) that speaks to your capability. Letting dust gather on a social media property will hurt, rather than help your credibility.
So, what’s your next move with LinkedIn? Per the advice on their explanatory page, you can concentrate on sharing the brilliance of what you do via updates and Showcase pages. The use of updates is especially intriguing because it demands at least semi-regular attention in order to refresh the content. You have to think about shifting away from the straight-ahead sales pitch, and instead share recent successes, company announcements, examples of expertise (e.g. blog posts, concept papers in your Knowledge Center, etc.) that don’t simply talk about what you do, but more effectively prove it!
The shift is another example of how social media engagement is as active as it is interactive. You need to be managing these properties, populating them with content and conversation that invites involvement at best, and provides intrinsic value to your audiences at the very least. Ultimately, it’s further proof that we no longer want to be told why you’re good at what you do; we want to be shown.
Want to learn more about managing your company LinkedIn presence? Email us or give us a call 877-703-PEAK.