LinkedIn Company Pages...It's a No from Me

I spend a lot of time educating people and sharing insights about how they can leverage their own LinkedIn Profiles to help build their professional brand, showcase their knowledge and engage strategically with their ideal audience. What I don’t focus much on are LinkedIn Company Pages, the reasons for which I shall reveal below.

Last week a valued Connection of mine, LinkedIn and Sales Performance Trainer Steve Phillip, published a great post outlining the changes LinkedIn’s Vice President of Product Tomer Cohen had announced the business-to-business platform was making to LinkedIn Company Pages, which are now to be simply named ‘Pages’.

Reportedly the changes to LinkedIn Company Pages are the biggest update Company Pages have experienced for a long time, with the new Pages being recreated from scratch. Released first in the United States, you should expect to see the alterations to Pages to come into effect on your own LinkedIn Company Page over the next few weeks.

The new redesign of Pages has been based upon three main principles:

Participate in relevant conversations
Know and grow your audience
Engage your people: for example, your employees

What Changes Are Being Made to LinkedIn Company Pages?

Page Admins can now publish content and reply to comments direct from LinkedIn’s iOS and Android apps.
For easier and more effective monitoring and participation in relevant conversations about their brands and industry, Admins have the ability to associate page content with hashtags
Admins now have the capability to share PDFs PowerPoints and Word Documents to their Page Followers.
A new ‘Content Suggestions’ [pictured] feature allows Admins to better curate engaging content based on what content is popular with their target audience, which Admins can segment based on industry, location, job function, seniority level and company size.
The redesign enables Admins to find and share public LinkedIn posts published by their employees on Pages and react to any post which mentions their Page on LinkedIn, enhancing engagement with customers who leave testimonials and product reviews, for instance.

While some may welcome the changes a positive step – and I must admit I often try and maintain a respectful approach to LinkedIn changes consisting of “Lets waits and sees” and “This *could* be a good thing*…” – I’m going to be BOLD with this one:

These updates to LinkedIn Company Pages are a complete waste of time for the majority of engaged LinkedIn users who are classed as SMEs!

Why?

Very few people actually Follow Company Pages (sorry, I mean Pages!)

I mean do you actively seek out the content Companies post?

You don’t know who your Page Followers are.

Whilst people tend to Connect with one another via their personal LinkedIn Profiles after say, meeting at a networking event, Pages only allows you to see Follower demographics, not their specific identities – meaning people who are no longer interested or active on LinkedIn could be Following your Page.

LinkedIn suppresses the sharing of Pages’ content.

Why? Because why would they do it for free when they wish you to pay for the privilege on LinkedIn Premium?

People build relationships with people, not Pages.

Heck, a great number of people don’t even Follow the Page belonging for the Company they work for or connect themselves to the correct (Company) Page in the ‘Experience’ section on their Profile. Some companies don’t even have a Page at all.

Pages content is never engaging content.

It is typically generated by the corporate marketing department and secures no traction. It is shared only by employees who typically add no context or value to the post by way of adding a comment or their professional insights when the share the post.

Most of us professional practitioners know the above factors to true…

So why on earth will a name change and the few updates we hear about make any difference at all?

Why I am being so BOLD with this statement?

Because I want you, the reader of this post, to understand the true position on this failed strategy by LinkedIn, and not be persuaded to change from engaging in the way you presently should – from your own profile!

By all means, have a Page to represent your Company with all the fields filled in to have a presence on the platform, and cherry-pick the crème de la crème of engaging content to publish once or week or so to keep the Page active. You can use the Page to showcase positive news about your company or information that would be useful to your audience… but the bulk of your engagement strategy and content should stem from your own LinkedIn profile!