With over 3.2 million company pages on LinkedIn now it has become a go to place not just for the serious business professional but increasingly as a trusted source of insight.

Even within the last 10 days there have been reports of 64% of all corporate website hits coming from LinkedIn in the UK and Europe and that the traffic patterns are starting to shift.

With the users starting to evolve expectancy from purist company pages with contextual experiences, updates, products and services to include more branding lead, engaging and content heavy opportunities for significant offerings of products or services in their own right.

This has led to the release of the “Showcase pages” as a way to enhance your LinkedIn presence for specific dimensions of your business, and whilst it offers many of the same features as Company Pages, there are some differences with Showcase Pages due to their different purposes.

Key features of a Showcase Page:

• 50% larger banner image at the top of the page to visually engage the audience and followers
• Deliver updates directly in the feed of your followers
• Two-column update design to put more emphasis on the content that you have shared
• The potential to attract, capture and feed content to a subset of your brand followers via a dedicated page
• Highlighted from your main company page on LinkedIn
• Show your group to attract more potential members
• It also offers the normal range of analytics, sponsored updates, featured groups and appearance in searches and advertisements as a regular company page

So why have a company page? Well only on a company page can you:

• Highlight the numbers of employees within your company on LinkedIn
• Post a career option or job within your a company using the job adverts or the premium Career Page for the Company Page to highlight your employment brand and culture.
• Display your range of services and / or products with points of contact, YouTube and more – If you need a products and services tab, we encourage you to use a Company Page. Showcase Pages are built to highlight the latest updates from brands, business units, and company initiatives.
• Capture the recommendations of happy clients to provide social proof of your market leading services and / or products to your potential clients.
• Context sensitive presentation, one of my personal favourites, the ability to contextualize your companies range of services or products to suit your audience. So client demographics get specific content and context to suit their viewpoints. See below, same company page two presentations, depending on who looks at it – very slick!

If your business is based around a single product or service at this time LinkedIn do not offer an “upgrade” path but I would think very carefully before considering a Showcase Page instead of a company page as, at this time, they are for a different purpose and are less rich in terms of client experience in many ways.

One aspect that didn’t get announced was the removal of some of the company page functionality around contextualization to the viewer where they reduced the number of wrappers available, but then they never tend to shout about that sort of thing.

Not good for all, but suspect they will evolve and get better over time, no doubt a premium paid for upgrade options will become available soon …

Our view, great to have if your offering fits the usage and hence useful for some but by no means as good as a company profile if you are making the choice.

Share this article