Using LinkedIn Showcase Pages to Promote Your Business

If you haven't been using LinkedIn's Showcase Pages to promote your business, you've been missing out on a very useful social media marketing tactic. Showcase Pages will allow you to promote specific products and services to various customer segments of your choosing, so that you can target very precise audiences with whatever products and services might be appropriate for them.Showcase Pages are really just an extension of your LinkedIn company page, and they permit you to feature a specific brand or product line. This of course, means that you need to have a company page before you can produce Showcase Pages, but once you have created them, they're very much a standalone feature. Each individual Showcase Page will have its own set of loyal followers, its own functionality, and its own status updates. In effect, each Showcase Page will serve as a kind of separate LinkedIn company page. Once you have created some Showcase Pages, they will appear on the right-hand side of your actual company page, so you will have visibility for each one of them.

Select a Showcase Page name

The first step in the process is to create a name for your Showcase Page, and ideally you should try to include SEO keywords in your page name which relate strongly to your business. Then you can choose a URL for your Showcase Page, and this probably won't be directly linked at all to your LinkedIn company page, but it will be something which appeals to you and your company. The benefit of this is that no one else can claim a LinkedIn Showcase Cape page which has the same name as yours.

Create a showcase page itself

In order to create a Showcase Page, you have to login to your normal LinkedIn company page, then click on the arrow which points down from the Edit tab, and then select the option to Create a Showcase Page, which is one of the options in the drop-down menu. You will have the capability of creating as many as 10 LinkedIn Showcase Pages which can be used for your business. If you have some extraordinary circumstances which warrant the creation of additional Showcase Pages, you can contact the support team at LinkedIn, and request that you be allowed to create additional pages.

Optimize your Showcase Page

You may not have been aware of this, but the Google search engine prioritizes LinkedIn company pages very highly, and assuming that they are properly optimized, these company pages will generally be ranked very high in search results. Fortunately, the same principle applies to Showcase Pages, so that the more followers you gain, and the more those followers become engaged with each of your Showcase Pages, the better will be the ranking for your Pages. With increased ranking on each page, you can anticipate a great deal more interest in your products and services, because they will reach a great deal more users, due to their Google popularity.

How to optimize your Showcase Pages

There are several approaches you can take for optimizing each of your Showcase Pages for searching. You'll get much more SEO attention if you can include your targeted keywords in your Showcase Page name, as well as in the description of that page. When you're developing a product or service description, you will be allowed to use 200 characters to create a really interesting description, so you should make use of this allowance to really pique the interest of your audience.First, you should be sure to include a link to the relevant product or service page on your website. Then, you should also include your logo as well as a header image which depicts your Showcase Page. Your header image can be a file formatted as a .PNG, a .jpeg, or a .gif, and the maximum file size for any image you use would be 2 MB, and should be sized at least at 974×330 pixels.Make a point of inviting all your loyal followers to monitor your Showcase Page, and invite them all to engage with any posts you have, as frequently as possible. With any postings you put on the page, make sure that they're very focused, and that they include SEO keywords you've targeted.

Examples of current Showcase Pages

If you'd like to check out some really good examples of what companies have done with their Showcase Pages, you can browse through some of the following. The Adobe Creative Cloud Showcase Page has upwards of 16,000 followers, and it makes great use of its header image. It also encourages all visitors to the Page to check out all their other LinkedIn Showcase Pages.The Intel IT Center Showcase Page has nearly 50,000 followers, and it makes excellent usage of the Featured Groups functionality in order to cross promote interest with their Intel IT Center LinkedIn group. To maximize engagement and visibility for all their posts, they retain a status update, which is constantly pinned to the top of their Showcase Page for convenience.Another great example you might want to check out is the LinkedIn Social Selling Showcase Page, which already has close to 40,000 followers, and which also makes great use of the Featured Groups function for cross promotion of their corresponding group. The competition for users attention is fierce among the social media these days, so having multiple methods of reaching your target audience on LinkedIn is a very effective strategy, and one that can produce great results.On their Showcase Page, LinkedIn has also pinned a status update at the page top, which is extremely useful for testing posts and content, in order to determine exactly what an audience responds to.  The bottom line on LinkedIn Showcase Pages is that they are one more tool in the social media marketing arsenal which can provide serious benefits for your company. However, like most social media marketing tactics, it takes time, commitment, and resources in order for your business to achieve any significant level of success with them.