In addition to adding more functionality to user profile pages, professional social network LinkedIn has been beefing up its Company Profiles on the network, allowing businesses to add a follow option, and include a news feed and career information. The idea behind these features is to encourage companies to add more data to their profiles, which can be useful for professionals looking for job opportunities and for recruiters as well. Today, LinkedIn is adding additional curated information to company pages, products, services and the ability to recommend a company or product.
On company pages, administrators can add products and services tab. So an accounting business can showcase various financial services the company offers. LinkedIn is taking it one step further to allow companies to tailor lists of products and services, based on member profiles. So a business owner can showcase one set of products (or services) to accountants in the aviation industry and another to engineers in the shipping industry.
Companies can also add videos of products and services to their pages and feature particular products more prominently than others.
In turn, LinkedIn members can recommend and review a product or service on a company profile, and their recommendations will surface on their own profiles as well. Company pages will list the people who have recommended a particular product as well. Interestingly, it looks like LinkedIn is using the recommendation technology from mSpoke, which LinkedIn acquired earlier this year.
LinkedIn is also revealing that a number of well known companies are using the Pages module, including Dell, HP, JetBlue, Microsoft and E*Trade.