LinkedIn’s Removal of Products & Services Tab
By now, business owners and the people who run company LinkedIn pages should be well aware of the changes happening on April 14, 2014. If not, here’s a quick recap: LinkedIn will discontinue its ‘Products & Services’ tab from all company pages. This means all of your time spent organizing and gathering customer recommendations will soon disappear, never to return.
First, let’s explain their decision and solutions. LinkedIn issued a statement via its Help Center, allowing us to understand what’s going on. The ‘Products & Services’ tab fell short of its valued reputation during LinkedIn’s site evaluations, thus, resulting in the tab’s extinction.
Until April 14, you can still edit existing products and services, but you can no longer add a product or service effective immediately. LinkedIn suggested saving recommendations by copying and pasting them into your own document, or by requesting a copy of the recommendations. If you choose the latter, you have until Friday, May 30 to do so.
To ease the blow of losing the ‘Products & Services’ page, LinkedIn suggests two alternatives to share information about your company.
Company Updates – This is your daily newsfeed. As long as people are following your company page, they will see the update. This can be tricky, as updates are only meant to do that – your news will soon get pushed to the bottom of the newsfeed.
Updates are a key element, though. It’s how you build and engage with your audience. Don’t be boring, and definitely do not ever forget to tell a story.
Showcase Pages – These can be found on the right side of your screen, and act as an extension to your company page. A Showcase Page creates pages for prominent products and services.
According to LinkedIn, a Showcase Page should be used for building long-term relationships with members who want to follow specific aspects of your business, and not for short-term marketing campaigns.
What does all of this mean for you? While the collection of endorsements and recommendations are valuable, it is not the end-all be-all.
Pam Hardy wrote an article similar to this one, and she brought up a very good point at the end. She said this is just another reminder of why it is not a good idea to rely solely on social media to communicate information about your company and its services. It’s easy to get swept up in social media and its reach, its power. Do not forget that your company has a website too, and it needs TLC just like the social media accounts.
A Business 2 Community article written by Dan Stasiewski, reminds us of one important thing. These pages—‘Products & Services’—kept the focus of our social media marketing efforts on our products, not solutions to customer problems. He argues the removal of this tab is not that big of a deal, and instead forces us into a New Age of Customer Communication.
This brings up another point. While people to need to know what products and services you offer, as well as customer reviews, they also are looking at you because they have a problem of some sort. Do not lose sight of that.
In a recent interview with Inc., Seth Godin, best-selling author and marketing guru, states what should be the obvious. When asked ‘how can companies get marketing right?’ Godin said:
“Start by understanding that no one cares about them. People care about themselves. Anyone who tweets about a brand or favorites a brand is doing it because it is a symbol of who they are–it is a token, it is a badge. It’s about them, it’s not about the brand.
It costs something to give companies attention and people are not going to give their attention just because a company bought a full-page ad in the newspaper. Commitment is what is required to change minds. We change our minds because we have made a commitment because something moves us.”
In the end, we work so hard to get recommendations (and we like all the bells and whistle’s LinkedIn or any social media site provides) and they can take it all away just like that. It’s annoying, but not absolutely devastating.