If you are using LinkedIn as a social media site for your company, take note. LinkedIn is discontinuing their Products and Services pages on April 14. For those who have depended upon those pages to describe your offerings to your followers, LinkedIn has given you the opportunity to shift that information over to their Showcase pages, which launched last fall. That is great for companies that have multiple products or business units (LinkedIn touts Microsoft as an example of a successful Showcase user). You can have up to ten Showcase pages before you begin paying for them.

If you are a small business with one service or product, Showcase may seem unnecessary. However, if you are using your Company Page updates for general information on your business, Showcase can be used for specifically marketing that one product or service. Unlike your Company Page, Showcase does not list job openings. It just focuses on the product. Just like the Company Pages, it allows you to have followers for those specific products. In marketing terms, this is a boon in helping you reach your target market. This is what other social networks have offered, but without all of the nonsensical, unrestricted attacks that keep CEOs from completely buying into the social media world. The other social media formats are fraught with all kind of dangers. Last year, the Facebook page for Nestle was bombarded with activists from Greenpeace who claimed that the use of palm oil was destroying rain forests. They posted redesigned Nestle brand logos with the word "Killer” in place of the product name. LinkedIn does not allow that kind of activity. You are more likely to be dealing with your true target market than the village idiot or someone with an agenda.

Another aspect of Showcase is the ability to not only promote products, but also to get crucial feedback from followers. Let’s say you are producing potato chips and you have three different flavors: Regular, BBQ and Fiery Hot. You could set up a Showcase page for each of the three flavors. Followers will act very similar to fans on Facebook or Twitter. However, with the ability to designate a page for one product, you can gauge the popularity of one against the other. You can also find out specifically what the followers like about that particular flavor. It becomes a quasi-marketing research tool.

Keep an eye on Showcase for your business offerings. I believe this is a positive step for LinkedIn – one which I believe the market will embrace. It is the kind of product engagement that has been missing from their format. It gives companies a safe place to market via social media. As it evolves, Showcase just might supplant other pop sites as the product specific social medium of choice.

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LinkedIn's new Showcase Pages allow companies to highlight specific products and projects, by Anthony Ha, Techcrunch.com, Nov 19, 2013

Nestle mess shows sticky side of Facebook pages, by Caroline McCarthy, CNet.com, March 19, 2010

Photo by Seewhatmitchsee