You may have noticed LinkedIn has changed again over the last few weeks. Read on to find out how you will be affected:
LinkedIn Company Pages
The products and services page on LinkedIn company pages will be removed from April 14. (If you set up a new company page now you won’t see the products and services option). For most people this won’t be a problem, but if you have received recommendations of your products / services, you will want to save the them! To do this, you will need to copy the recommendation into a Word document so that you can use it on promotional or marketing material or in an update. (You should get permission from the person who made the recommendation to use it). Follow my company page to get my company updates.
LinkedIn Publishing
I have been given access to the publishing platform on LinkedIn. This means that I can
write a blog style post within LinkedIn which is shared across LinkedIn as well as being displayed on my profile. You can sign up to get access to the publishing platform here.
Every week LinkedIn tells me how many people saw, liked or commented on my post. People can also share the post on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+). I assume the more people who comment, like or share, the more likely LinkedIn is to show the post to others.
I’m undecided on how I’m personally going to use this. Information that I post within LinkedIn needs to be added value and different from the information that I post on this blog.
On the one hand, posting on LinkedIn will potentially get my personal profile in front of more people throughout the LinkedIn network and may increase my network of contacts. So long as the posts I offer add value and promote conversation I should get comments, share and views. By including my relevant links at the bottom of the post, I could encourage people to come to my website.
On the other hand by posting information on my blog and sharing across networks, I am getting people to come and look round my website and by others sharing content from the website, I am encouraging Google to think the website has quality content and therefore Google will promote the site in search results.
I post to my blog every week – personally I will struggle to find the time or to have the content ideas to post regularly on my blog and directly on LinkedIn.
I guess (like with all social media) it comes down to what would be my aims for using the tool – do I want to build my personal brand and credibility or do I want to search results and people visiting the website? These reasons are not mutually exclusive by any means – more to ponder on I feel.
Over to you
I would love to know your thoughts both on the changes to company profiles and the new option to publish on LinkedIn. Please use the comments below – and do share this post if you find it useful 🙂