LinkedIn's New Showcase Pages Allow Companies To Highlight Specific Products And Projects
LinkedIn is announcing a new feature called a Showcase Page that will allow businesses on the professional networking site to target the fans of a specific product or brand.
Context & Ripple Effects
Showcase Pages extend a line LinkedIn has been building for years: after the redesigned homepage and LinkedIn News push in December 2007 and the company-detail work covered by louisgray.com in March 2008, the site has steadily added surfaces aimed at organizations rather than individuals. Showcase Pages are the next step down that ladder — splitting the single company page into per-product, per-brand pages with their own follower audiences.
The pickup was unusually broad for a feature launch — the Official LinkedIn Blog, AdExchanger, ZDNet, The Next Web, Search Engine Watch and others all carried it on or about November 19, 2013 — which says less about the feature itself than about how closely the marketing trade watches LinkedIn's ad inventory.
First-order effects
- Marketers managing multi-brand portfolios gain a dedicated LinkedIn page per product or project, letting them segment followers instead of broadcasting everything through one corporate page.
- LinkedIn's sales pitch to advertisers shifts from 'reach professionals' to 'reach the followers of this specific product,' adding a new targeting unit to its marketing surface.
Second-order effects
- Agencies and brand teams now have one more page-per-property to staff and maintain on LinkedIn, raising the operational cost of a fragmented multi-network brand presence alongside Facebook and Twitter presences.
- Rival networks' own brand-page products become the comparison point: if product-level segmentation proves out on LinkedIn, competitors face pressure to offer equivalent per-brand audience tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, professional networks drift from member-centric directories toward advertising platforms organized around commercial entities, with each new page type carving the audience into finer, more sellable segments.
The trend: LinkedIn is progressively converting its professional graph into segmented marketing surfaces, moving from one company page per business toward product- and brand-level ad inventory.