Let Your B2B Brand Dominate with Linkedin Showcase Pages
As a B2B Marketing Agency, MLT Creative knows the importance of engagement on social media platforms and in particular LinkedIn. We encourage all of our clients to use LinkedIn to make connections, grow their network, and even generate leads. Together, Viveka von Rosen and MLT Creative have developed a LinkedIn Launchpad Training Series to help you and your business become more productive and successful using LinkedIn. We have personally learned, listened and improved from Viveka’s advice, and we hope you will too.
LinkedIn recently removed Products & Services pages from Company Pages – boo! But let’s not focus on the negative. They also introduced Showcase pages last year – and with the elimination of P&S pages, our focus should now be on the amazing opportunities afforded us by this new branding and content publishing platform on LinkedIn.
Since LinkedIn is really focusing on becoming a Content Marketing platform (Publisher, Pulse, etc) it makes sense that they are recreating the Company and Showcase page platform to help in the curation and dissemination of targeted content. Particularly useful since we are bloggers and that’s what we do!
Showcase pages are essentially sub pages of your LinkedIn Company page. (if you don’t yet have a company page, create that first.) To create a Showcase page simply click the drop down arrow to the right of the “edit” button in your Company page and then click on the link that says “Create a Showcase Page”.
Showcase pages look a little bit like Twitter and Pinterest and Facebook got together and had a baby. Fortunately, they are pretty simple to set up:
- Title your page (and this becomes your url: www.linkedin.com/company/companyname)
- Add a big beautiful branded hero image (974 x 330 pixels) to capture attention
- Add any admins you want to post content to your page
- Name your page (in case you want a more detailed title than your page title)
- Start updating to engage your target market
- Share your Page with your followers on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and your blog.
Since Showcase pages have unique URLs( that are assigned to you according to how you title your page) it’s a really good idea to get your Showcase pages now! You can ask for up to 10 showcase pages.
What does this look like for you?
Let’s say you have a blog called Women in Business at www.womeninbusiness.com. Your main Company page would be named Women in Business. (To create your main Company page you would have to have the name@womeninbusiness.com URL) Your Showcase pages would be like you different Categories or audiences. So you might create a Showcase Pages that speak directly to your niche audiences:
- Hispanic women in business
- Female entrepreneurs
- What to wear as a woman in business
- Business etiquette for women
Each of these Showcase pages have their own images which reflect your brand and the topic. You might set up different writers for your blog as administrators to share their posts with their target – feeding those pages with content relating to those categories on your blog.
Other uses for Showcase pages?
- A featured product or service you want to build some hype around
- Subsidiaries of your company
- A yearly event you hold
- A regular event you hold
Another bonus? Since Google really likes Linkedin Company pages, the more activity you have on your Showcase page – the more activity you are likely to get on your blog feed. There is no doubt that LinkedIn drives more traffic to corporate sites than any other social medium (it says so in the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn)
Showcase Pages are free, but I recommend using HootSuite ($10) or Octapost ($30) to create, schedule and disseminate your posts to your different Showcase pages on LinkedIn.
Showcase Pages afford us a great opportunity to create our Brand and drive traffic to our businesses. Make sure you invest and create one today!
Viveka von Rosen, the founder of Linked Into Business, is a successful entrepreneur, nationally renowned IA Certified LinkedIn trainer and expert, and a respected social media speaker.
