LinkedIn has announced a new ‘Products’ tab for Company Pages, which will provide a dedicated space for businesses to showcase their product offerings, and highlight key features, via their LinkedIn presence.

As explained by LinkedIn: 

“With Product Pages you can spotlight product endorsements and testimonials by your users, gather ratings and reviews from current users, and generate leads with a custom call-to-action button, such as a demo request or contact sales form. In the new “Products” Tab, you can add new products you want to feature and include rich media like videos or product screenshots, descriptions and more.”

As you can see in the above image, the new ‘Products’ tab will live within your LinkedIn Company Page, and will feature a listing of products offered by your organization. The tab will open to either an alphabetical listing of your products (if you have several to list) or to your single, main product page.

LinkedIn’s aiming to create a trusted overview for product offerings, distinct from services or business divisions (which would instead be featured on a Showcase page), which links all of the displayed reviews and endorsements back to actual LinkedIn users and/or brand pages, providing more assurance of their legitimacy.

But in order to do this, LinkedIn has to also play a role in curating which products a business can actually list on their Products tab.

As per LinkedIn’s overview, when you first go to set up your Products tab, you’ll see a curated listing of products, which LinkedIn has created.

“We curated your Page based on existing data from both your company website and the LinkedIn platform.”

So you don’t upload your product catalog or add listings yourself, LinkedIn will do it for you, with the product names and categories all displayed based on information that LinkedIn has gathered (businesses can submit change requests for those listings if required).

That will help LinkedIn ensure that its product listings are accurate, and relevant, and are not being used to display random items or offers which don’t fit.

In fact, LinkedIn specifically notes that Product Pages cannot only display specified products:

“Product Pages are reserved for tangible product offerings to the market. Products typically have a manufacturer, a trademarked brand name, and a name used consistently on product pages and the web in reference to that product, along with other attributes such as description and logo.”

LinkedIn does additionally note that it’s looking to launch a ‘services marketplace’ in the near future, which will provide options to list all your various other business elements. But this is not it.

Once you have your Product tab, and a listing of your available products, you can then add product logos, descriptions, visual assets, and a display of existing customers for each.

You can also add a target audience for your product: 

“Add up to 10 job functions or indicate your product is intended for everyone. Be comprehensive when adding your target users, as this impacts how your product shows up in LinkedIn search results.”

So, for example, if your product is used to create advertising campaigns, you can select “Digital marketing specialist”, “demand generation manager”, and “social media strategist.” That will then help improve your visibility to users with these job titles within LinkedIn search and other features.

You can also add a CTA, with six options to choose from:

• Download now
• Get started
• Request demo
• Try now
• Contact us
• Learn more

You can also add a CTA URL, along with a website link, to guide direct traffic from your product showcase.

Once you’ve filled in all the info, your product listing will be ready to go live.

It’s an interesting option from LinkedIn, providing a more comprehensive showcase option for businesses on the platform. As noted, LinkedIn has had Showcase pages, in addition to Company Pages, for years, which provides another way to highlight different divisions within your company. Products adds the next element, and with a services option also in the works, you’ll soon have all the tools to provide a complete overview of your business’ offerings on the largest professional network in the world.

That will provide LinkedIn with more promotional opportunities. As businesses look to showcase more of their offerings on the platform, that will then enable LinkedIn to become more of a connector for relevant opportunities, which will then add more impetus for brands to put more focus on their LinkedIn presence, and explore advertising and promotional options to boost their exposure to relevant audiences.

It seems like a a good addition, though it’ll likely spook some of the other B2B product review sites, like G2Crowd, currently on the market.

Right now, LinkedIn’s starting off with B2B software products: 

“Today we have more than 10,000 Product Pages, across the B2B software category with plans to add more industries in the coming year.”

How far those listings will go, we’ll have to wait and see. But it’s a big update for LinkedIn company pages, with a lot of potential for your brand listings.

You can read more about LinkedIn’s Product pages here.