LinkedIn Company Pages Offer the Most Honest

LinkedIn has significantly stepped up its social game recently, redesigning company pages, letting you follow organizations, enhancing the site layout, and other changes.  However, the site’s most recent enhancement may be its most important.  

LinkedIn is now letting individuals “recommend” companies and their specific services and products -- this move directly aligns with one of the most important aspects of a discovery or due diligence process associated with a new deal or RFP, reviewing your past work and references.

LinkedIn is already a go-to source of information for people looking to research other professionals, and now it hopes to have the same purpose for people looking to do independent research companies.

It also can’t go without mentioning that these company pages and associated recommendations organically rank very high in search engines.  A Google search for “new media campaigns” shows our LinkedIn company page on the first page of results!  And that’s for a competitive, broad term -- a more original and specific name will likely have LinkedIn rank even higher.

Interestingly, as companies have attempted to become more social over the past couple years by creating Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, there hasn’t been a truly honest way to assess a company’s past performance through their social media presence.  

Companies can buy Likes on Facebook or trade Follows on Twitter, leading both metrics to be frequently manipulated by companies trying to appear to be the most liked and/or followed.  Even for honest participants, it often seemed the numbers correlate more to the company’s reach rather than reputation (i.e., it's not too tough for Microsoft to get to 100,000 Likes when mining 30,000 employees and their families).

LinkedIn has removed any ambiguity by featuring client crafted recommendations on a company’s homepage.  Now prospective clients have another publicly available tool to analyze possible vendors and it’s only a Google search away.

This new feature will be incredibly important as prospective clients continue to conduct online research of their potential vendors online.  We’ve previously written about how to use LinkedIn to market your company and this new feature should be the next tactic in your LinkedIn marketing efforts.  It’s important you setup your organizations LinkedIn page and prompt past clients to offer honest endorsements of your services.

The next time someone is Googling you and your competition, a LinkedIn page full of recommendations may be the tipping point to win you a deal.