When you think of Social Media, the first thoughts are of Facebook and Twitter. Not many of us think immediately of LinkedIn, but with over 90 million users LinkedIn is a valuable tool. It allows business professionals to stay connected to their business network but historically it has been perceived mostly as a personal profile tool rather than an online marketing tool for your business.
Recently LinkedIn made changes to its Company Pages which now make LinkedIn a more powerful component in your online marketing toolbox, especially if you market Business to Business.
The Basics of a Company Page
You can upload your logo, add a business description and link to your blog or articles RSS feed as well as Twitter.
The Overview lists staff contacts and links to their profiles. 
The new features...
The other new features are the ability to add product and services to company pages, along with product listings, product multimedia and a recommendation (testimonial) module.
“Company pages now allow you to showcase recommendations from your customers, and help build your brand virally and credibly on LinkedIn,” said Director of Product Management Ryan Roslansky at the time of the launch. “Each time a LinkedIn member endorses your products or services, their recommendation becomes visible to all of their connections and could spread virally.”
The Company pages have three sections: Overview, Careers and Products.
Products & Services
Your company can list each of its products or services, upload a 100 x 80 pixel icon and description of each, and create a bullet list of attributes.
As well as this you can embed a YouTube video for each Product & Service. Video is a powerful online marketing tool and gives you the opportunity to engage people in a contextually relevant manner. To see examples of product & services videos check out examples of VideoMadeSimple’s work.
To add a Product or Service the steps are:
Step 1. Choose between a product or service
Step 2. Select a category
Step 3. Name your product or service
Step 4. Add an image of your product or service.
Step 5. Describe your product or service
Step 6. List of key features & Disclaimer
Step 7. Add a URL for this product or service
Step 8. Add a contact from your company
Step 9. Add a promotion for this product or service
Step 10. Add a YouTube video about this product or service
Step 11. Add your YouTube video URL
PUBLISH
Here's an example of WebStarter as a LinkedIn Product:
Recommendations or Testimonials
The recommendation section allows you to get testimonials from your customers for each of your products or services. According to Forrester Research (in Groundswell), 83% of us say we are at least somewhat influenced by word-of-mouth. Having an endorsement on LinkedIn to substantiate the “Success Stories” on your website will prove extremely valuable in influencing potential clients to choose you.
Offers and Campaigns
As well as the ability to include Products & Services on your website each product or service also has the ability to link a unique offer to it.
Analytics
Being an online marketing tool there are some nice measurement tools that allow you to view your performance in terms of page views, visitors, clicks on various types of content visits by industry and followers.
The functionality is there for LinkedIn to compare your performance in each of these categories with similar benchmarked companies.
Careers
The careers section allows you to upload jobs available in your company. The standard features of a job listing are included and the cost is $195 for a 30 day listing.
For me I feel I have only brushed the tip of the iceberg that is the new LinkedIn Company Page. I’m looking forward to exploring it more and starting to use it to better support our online marketing.
Sarah