Social Up! LinkedIn Introduces Showcase Pages for Business

By Marie Alonso 1

If you are like most businesses optimizing social media today (look away shamefully if you are not), you likely have a LinkedIn page for your business. Great news: LinkedIn is giving businesses more creative ways to share content!

Recently, the social network for professionals launched “showcase” pages—a place on LinkedIn where companies can freely publish information related to a specific area of their business. According to the “world’s definitive professional publishing platform,” the debut of LinkedIn Showcase Pages enables companies to better position brands by sharing more relevant, targeted information. 

LinkedIn’s official statement on the launch of Showcase Pages is:

“Now companies can extend their LinkedIn presence by creating dedicated pages for their more prominent brands, businesses, and initiatives. Through Showcase Pages, companies can segment content to distinct audiences who are interested in different aspects of their business. It’s a new way to directly engage the right people in the right context. We worked very closely in a pilot phase with a handful of premiere companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft and HP, to build and fine-tune the product and are excited to unveil it to you today.”

With Showcase Pages, businesses can expand their reach beyond current followers by promoting content through Sponsored Updates, enabling brands to directly share from a Showcase Page to members’ feeds on desktop, smartphone and tablet. Showcase Pages can be created by a current company page administrator who can then add more administrators to manage the new pages. Businesses will be able to monitor the performance of their Showcase Pages by utilizing LinkedIn’s analytics tools. Best yet, companies will not be charged for creating Showcase Pages—and companies can create up to 10 of them on their own!

What’s So Great About a LinkedIn Showcase Page?

For businesses with diverse platforms of services, Showcase Pages allow for, well, showcasing of different products, services and areas of specialty. Companies can more easily leverage LinkedIn to accentuate the nuances of their product lines. Showcase Pages help companies engage LinkedIn users better, enabling for a better relay of company expertise, information and, of course, branding.

LinkedIn is encouraging businesses to make good use of the new platform afforded by Showcase Pages, emphasizing the importance of visual elements and quality content, including embedded videos. The more visually interesting a company is, the better the audience reception—and the greater its followers!

With the growing emphasis on content marketing, it’s terrific that LinkedIn is affording an enhanced experience for businesses to share branded content. According to LinkedIn, its members are constantly seeking insights, information and expertise related to professional services and entrepreneurial pursuits, including relevant content posted by thought leaders—businesses just like yours! The new Showcase Pages are yet another creative platform to leverage all the expertise your company has to share, creating a genuine content reservoir for showcasing diverse services, products and your team’s unique superpowers.

Marie Alonso is an online marketing and media strategist at Miles Technologies, a leading IT company. The Miles Technologies team contributes business-driven content to The VAR Guy regularly.