Social media is transforming to be more visual and ultimately more mobile-friendly. LinkedIn recently introduced some changes to improve the overall Company Page experience and made it easier to interact with your connections.
I’ve asked Rachel Kerstetter, our PR Engineer, to give our readers an overview of LinkedIn’s changes and how you can take advantage of them.
Facebook started the wave of change by introducing timeline for brand pages and eventually individual profiles. Now, in the same short span of time, Twitter introduced a cover image and LinkedIn overhauled its company pages to be more visual and mobile-friendly.
Just as Facebook pushed all of its brand pages to timeline by a certain date, LinkedIn has a deadline of November 30th for all company profiles to have the new format.
Here are a few of the main changes that you should be aware of if you control a LinkedIn Company Profile:
- Banner image at the top of company pages. Mimicking the Facebook cover photo, LinkedIn’s banner image gives you the opportunity to show off some personality for your company. This image should be 974 x 240 pixels; many companies that have already uploaded banner images have incorporated not only their branding but some of their corporate culture and a few have used it to highlight products or services. LinkedIn gives you the option to make this banner clickable to take people to your company’s website.
- Career section. LinkedIn has highlighted the career section of company pages, making it easier for businesses looking for new talent to showcase opportunities.
- Refined company information. The overhaul makes communicating about your company cleaner and hopefully more effective. The About section is now shorter, but you can post more links to send people to your blog or other social media as well as your company website. Products and services are more visible in the side bar, drawing attention with visuals. A custom company module gives you a place to showcase your company culture, awards, events or other information.
- Better visibility. Updates from your company are now front and center on your company page and LinkedIn has updated their stream, so your company information is more visible overall.
Check out the Sonnhalter company page for an example of the new style.
LinkedIn is also rolling out changes to individual profiles:
You can now endorse others for their skills or be endorsed. Recommendations are still very powerful, but to show that a colleague or partner is particularly skilled in a certain area, you can now endorse individual skills. Your list of skills has been turned into a list of buttons, but if you have a wordy skill description, it will be cut off and there isn’t a way for your connections to see the entire skill, so take a look and shorten your skill descriptions if needed.
Mouse over a skill and click to endorse it
Profiles will also get a new look, without any action needed from you. I requested to be switched to the new design early, here’s a brief snapshot of what my profile looks like now:
To preview more of the new individual profiles and request to switch early too, check out LinkedIn’s blog.
