If you closely follow the happenings in social media, then you have probably heard about the redesign of company pages on LinkedIn. They were first introduced a while back, when they started beta testing the new design with a few select companies. People all over the web seem to be responding well to this redesign of the company pages. A good response is uncommon when it comes to making over social media pages, because users tend to fall in love with the format they know and have been using for a long time. With their new design, though, comes something that marketers and businesses alike can get excited about.
LinkedIn will now offer free featured posts on company pages to its users. This will essentially give all the advantages of a featured post that would be used on other social networks, but in this case there is no money involved. With these featured updates, marketers and businesses will be able to have a post stay at the very top of their feed for at least 48 hours. It sounds very similar to the featured posts on Facebook, but Facebook has done everything they possibly could to ensure that marketers and businesses pay for it.
Now, as studies in the past have shown, and as is basically common knowledge in the marketing world, LinkedIn works best for business-to-business marketers, and not quite as well for business-to-consumer. So, even though they are offering a free service that Facebook charges for, Facebook still has the advantage of their mixed user base that can cater to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers.
Marketers however, should not put too much of their interest into Facebook’s featured posts, as their algorithm has been apparently seeing some unforeseen changes lately.
From an article on Business Insider;
Two prominent social media marketing executives have gone on record to accuse Facebook of quietly altering one of its key algorithms in September, so that companies with pages that have large numbers of followers can now only reach a fraction of the followers they used to with each post.
Facebook being accused of dishonesty is not new. They seem to be finding ways to screw over marketers all the time, or at least they are accused of it quite often. However, I have never seen anyone accuse LinkedIn of dishonesty in their advertising, unless I just haven’t been looking in the right places.
Anyways, this article was not initially meant to be a Facebook versus LinkedIn article, but it should be easy to understand how it became one. Facebook is trying to make marketers and businesses pay for the featured posts that LinkedIn is currently offering to their users for free. Even though both sites are clearly used for different reasons, it is still exciting that the feature is being offered for free. Anyway, the LinkedIn page design has been getting good feedback from all over the web, and marketers have been loving the free featured posts that came along with them.
