Last week, I got to play around with our LinkedIn page. The “Products and Services” piece of company pages was discontinued in April to make way for the new “Showcase Pages.” These pages are a chance to, well, showcase, your company’s skills and services. Sounds like a great tool, right?
Right. But, there were a few things that caught me off guard during this process, and I thought I’d shares them with you:
1. There’s a 200 character limit: When I pushed up my sleeves and got started on this little project, I was stoked. I had all these plans about what I was going to put on each of the four pages, what images to use, what I was going to write… And then, LinkedIn threw all these parameters at me.
For starters, each Showcase Page is limited to 200 characters. That’s 20 less than your average tweet.
I managed to build all four pages within LinkedIn’s rules, and I’ll probably need to go back and refine what’s there. Clearly, “short and sweet” is the ruling philosophy, and I must say, it was a great exercise in keeping it simple.
2. There’s more data to keep track of: In case you didn’t already know, LinkedIn business pages have analytics that measure how many followers you have, their demographic, and how often they engage with your posts.
An example of what information LinkedIn measures for businesses.
Since each page is set up as it’s own entity, each page has its own set of analytics. For smaller businesses, this seems overwhelming. I had no idea I set up four new pages for myself to manage. That’s a lot of data.
But, maybe it’s a ‘divide and conquer’ sort of thing. We may notice that our Social Media Marketing page is generating a lot of engagement among its many followers, while our Workshops and Training page is a virtual ghost town. With this knowledge, we invest some time into building up the weaker areas.
3. It’s an opportunity to reach the right people:
This article explains that a large company like Gap can manage its individual branches (Old Navy, Banana Republic, Piperlime) in an easier manner. Plus, those who are interested in Old Navy don’t necessarily shop at Banana Republic, so following the company as a whole doesn’t seem appeal to them. Showcase pages allow them to “divide and conquer.”
Since we don’t have branches at Breaking Even, it made sense to divide our Showcase Pages by services. One page is dedicated to E-Mail Marketing, one is for Website Design, the third focuses on Social Media Marketing, and the last is for Workshops and Training. Each showcase page links back to the corresponding information page on our website.
Our Social Media Marketing Page
ALL of our clients aren’t interested in ALL of our services. A Showcase Page may encourage those who only want to focus on Social Media Marketing to follow that particular page, when maybe they were put off by following the company as a whole.
4. You have to build everything from scratch: Another detail I wasn’t aware of- when you create a Showcase Page, it becomes its own entity. It doesn’t bring in any of the people who already follow the company. When I discovered this, I was pretty frustrated, and wondered “What’s the point, then?!”
Well, going back to the example of a larger business, it does makes sense not to automatically move followers of Gap Co. to each of their showcase pages.
But what about smaller businesses? Admittedly, it’s more work for us. Our audiences aren’t as large, and convincing people to follow our showcase pages when they already follow the company page feels silly. I’ve come to look at it this way: by starting showcase pages from scratch, users are encouraged to opt-in. They have a choice to like the page, and when they do, it means they are serious about it, as opposed to being moved over from a larger list. The numbers you generate are interested followers, not people who follow you because they didn’t have a say in the matter.
Starting from scratch.
In the end, Showcase Pages have a lot to offer, even to us small business types. Yes, it creates a little more work, and probably doesn’t seem like it’s worthwhile. Admittedly, those were my thoughts, too, at first- but, as with most things in life, it’s all about how you use it.