Expanding upon the “Company Pages” feature recently implemented, where members are able to follow companies, LinkedIn now provides an added service that will allow users to submit product and service reviews for a company.

Companies with profiles already on the site will be able to add features such as product listings, multimedia, and a tab for member reviews.  In addition, once a member submits a product recommendation, their review becomes visible to all contacts in their network, helping spread the word of their endorsement, and in turn promote company brand awareness.

LinkedIn serves as a business social network in order to help users build professional networks and gain contacts. Over 80 million are already members worldwide, and this is continuing to grow. But with the increase of business marketing tools on Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is looking to maintain its hold on the social needs of the business community.

Outside of the education vertical, the uses of the tab seem obvious. How this service can apply to higher education institutions is not yet clear. Can a school market themselves as a product through its capabilities? What about a specific program? It will be interesting to see what types of companies and organizations make use of the new service in the months ahead.  It may take a little while for the “Products & Services” tab to roll out to all LinkedIn members, but here are a few that are already using it, and using it well:

• CUnet (If we do say so ourselves)
• HP Enterprise Services
• Dell
• Microsoft

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Tags: linkedin, marketing, products and services, social networks

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.