Nov 2, 2010

LinkedIn Gives Companies New Promotion Tools

LinkedIn is looking to get brands more involved with the site’s users through the launch of a suite of features designed to give them a stronger presence on the business social network.

The new features add product and service recommendations to company pages, along with product listings, product multimedia and a recommender module.

Company pages now allow you to showcase recommendations from your customers, and help build your brand virally and credibly on LinkedIn. Each time a LinkedIn member endorses your products or services, their recommendation becomes visible to all of their connections and could spread virally.

Company pages now essentially have three tabs: overview, careers and products. The products tab is where all of this new information is displayed. Brands have a great deal of control over what is displayed on their pages. Just check out the pages for HP and Dell to see what I mean.

The new products tab is definitely an attempt by the company to get brands invested in LinkedIn. One of the reasons Facebook and Twitter have soared in popularity is that brands have inserted tons of resources into their presences on both social media platforms; it’s resulted in brands promoting their presences on both, creating more users and more ad dollars.

Today’s update is a good start, but LinkedIn will have to do more in order to really engage brands and users in the same way that they engage on Facebook and Twitter.