Social Media & Technology

LinkedIn Company Pages Help Businesses Attract Employees, Customers

Posted by on Nov 5, 2010 | 12 Comments

Earlier this week LinkedIn unveiled their newest feature aimed at helping businesses strengthen and manage their reputation as an employer: Company Pages. Designed to bring together current employees while also highlighting products,  services, and key information about the company, LinkedInCompany Pages is currently still in beta. Companies can customize pages to include (or exclude) current employees, new hires, products and services, available careers, and overviews, current network connections, recommendations, and demographics of the company.

The development of Company Pages highlights the professional tone of LinkedIn; It is not Facebook (where you may swap photos of barbecues, new family members and embarrassing holiday sweaters,) nor is it Twitter (where you share and microblog niche news). LinkedIn is a place to connect with past, current and perhaps future employers. LinkedIn is a place to connect with business partners. LinkedIn is a place to learn about a brand, not just as a consumer, but as business-to-business.

With Company Pages, LinkedIn is clearly creating their own identity as the social network for professional networking, while also giving control to brands and businesses to define their own role. The varying difference between LinkedIn’s “charter customers,” such as AT&T Business Solutions, and the default setup for companies, highlights how much customization can be achieved. A brand controls how demographics, employee data, and new hires are displayed to manage the company reputation – not just as a brand that offers a product or a service, but as an employer.

The new “Companies” tab is already live for LinkedIn users, though many will find that the companies they follow have a very rough, undeveloped beta page. The benefit to companies will be in how quickly human resources departments adapt these new pages and utilize them as a hub for hiring resources, as LinkedIn is already a primary resource for job seekers with more than 80 million members worldwide.

Will LinkedIn’s Company Pages benefit your professional networking activity? Or is this just another group feature of LinkedIn we don’t need?

  • http://www.guaranteedseo.com Julien Fontbonne

    Hi Kelly,

    First, thanks for your article about LinkedIn. I do think that the company section is a good thing as it allows you to share very easily information about your company with people that might be interested in becoming a new employee or even in investing. I also like the new follow feature, especially if you are looking for a job or stay professionally in touch with a business owner friend’s activity.

    Nevertheless, I am wondering when their project will be completed.
    I have some trouble setting up the blog rss feed on my company profile. Same thing for Twitter feed. It works perfectly with my personal profile but not with the company one.

    Any update on that topic?

  • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

    Good call!

  • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

    …for a LOT of people.

  • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

    Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

  • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

    I’ve been wrong more than once. :)

  • Dan

    It would have made a great internet machine. Any Linux distro would have made it a machine that would have satisfied 90% of people’s needs.

  • http://satorikun.wordpress.com/ satori

    Currently using a Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz socket 478 machine – on a board which supports DDR2 RAM and PCI-E graphics. And it still works like a charm ^^

  • Anonymous

    Had to add that there’s a great company in Issaquah, WA called 1GreenPlanet (don’t know if they have other locations, sorry) and they will take all used electronics, scrap metal, TV’s, and all of the other electronic stuff you feel guilty throwing in the trash for free. I make routine trips over there myself.

    • http://chris.pirillo.com/ Chris Pirillo

      I had no idea. That’s awesome! I hope I remember them… :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002286250939 Andreas Hartmann

    I personally love restoring very old hardware to a usable state. While my primary machine is a Phenom II quadcore I also have a P4 1.8 ghz and a celeron 1.4 ghz notebook which are still perfectly ok. But my favorite machine on which I am proudly using my own LFS Distro to surf the web on WLAN is a Pentium MMX Notebook with 80 MB of RAM and a 2 GB Hard Drive.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Corey-Watford/100000938231196 Corey Watford

    My brother’s computer has 256mb of ram and a 1ghz intel processor, and a 60gb Hardrive-that trash above is truely a treasure he could have used

  • http://twitter.com/edwardholmes91 Edward Holmes

    I think it is very wasteful to of thrown such a thing away. If it was very old then yes but some people would love to have a machine like this. Not to mention it could have been sent to a third world country free of charge to you! Many charities exist that do this recycling for free!