LinkedIn Retires the Products Tab

The tab that goes today

From today, LinkedIn is removing the Products and Services tab from company pages. For years it held a list of what a company sells, each item with a description, a picture and a link.

Many items also gathered recommendations: short notes from customers and connections, shown with their names and photographs. Those recommendations go with the tab.

If the tab is still showing on your company page, save what is on it now, while each recommendation still sits beside its writer's name and photograph.

What goes with it

The descriptions usually exist elsewhere, on the website or in a brochure. The recommendations usually do not, and they are the part that took years to collect.

Banner images made for the tab, special offers, and the names of staff listed as contacts for each product disappear as well.

Followers of the company page are not affected, and recommendations on personal profiles stay where they are. Only what sat on the tab itself goes.

What to save first

Work through the tab item by item and copy these before it disappears:

• Each recommendation, with the writer's name, title and the date.
• Descriptions written only for LinkedIn, which may be better than the website's.
• Banner images and photographs not stored anywhere else.
• The links each item pointed to, to see which website pages they used.
• The contact names listed against each product.

Copy the text into a document and take screen captures as a backup. A screen capture also records how each recommendation appeared, which helps when asking to reuse it.

Asking before reusing a recommendation

A recommendation was written for LinkedIn, not for your website or a printed brochure. Before quoting it elsewhere with the writer's name, ask them.

Most people agree readily. Some will want it shortened, updated, or shown with their initials only, especially if they have changed jobs since.

Keep each reply with the recommendation, so anyone updating the website later knows which quotes may be used and on what terms.

Where the content belongs now

The company's own website is the natural home for descriptions of what it sells, with a page for each service and the recommendations its writers have approved.

A platform can change or remove a feature at any time, as today shows. A page on your own domain stays until you decide otherwise.

LinkedIn then becomes the place to point people to those pages, through updates and the links on the company page.

A page for each service

Each service page should say what the service is, who it suits, what is included, how pricing works and how to start. The approved recommendations sit beside the details they vouch for.

An update on LinkedIn can then link to a page that answers the reader's next question, rather than to a home page they have to search.

Showcase Pages

Since late last year, LinkedIn has let companies create Showcase Pages: separate pages for a brand, a business unit or a product line, which members follow on their own.

They suit a company with distinct audiences, such as a manufacturer with a consumer line and an industrial line. Each page needs its own regular updates, and someone to write them.

A Showcase Page with no updates tells its followers the company has lost interest. For most small companies, one well-kept company page is a better use of the time.

Updates on the company page

Updates are short posts on the company page that appear in followers' feeds. A brief update about one service, linking to its page on your website, does what the tab used to do.

A pace the company can keep matters more than volume. One useful update a week, kept up all year, serves better than a burst in April and silence after.

Staff can share each update with their own connections, many of whom will never visit or follow the company page itself.

A worked example

A resume writer works with two other writers from a small office, offering resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles and interview coaching to job seekers and people changing careers.

Their clients live on LinkedIn, so the Products and Services tab mattered. Each package had its own entry, and over three years they had collected many recommendations.

When the notice came, the owner copied every recommendation with its writer's name and date, then wrote to each writer asking to quote it on the firm's website.

Each service now has its own page on the website, with the recommendations that writers approved. The firm decided against Showcase Pages: four services, one audience, and not enough hours for five pages.

Each week the company page carries one update linking to a service page or a short piece of advice, and the owner's own profile shows recommendations from past clients.

Personal profiles still carry recommendations

Recommendations on a member's own profile are unaffected. For a firm where clients know the owner personally, those may carry more weight than a product entry ever did.

A satisfied client can be asked to write one there, about the person they worked with, in their own words. It stays on that profile whatever LinkedIn does to company pages.

The counter-case

A company whose tab was empty, or years out of date, loses nothing today. It need not rush to build Showcase Pages to fill a gap nobody noticed.

For a business whose customers rarely use LinkedIn, the time is better spent on its website than on Showcase Pages or a schedule of updates.

But wherever recommendations sat on the tab, they were earned from real customers. Saving them, and asking to use them, takes an hour and keeps something that would otherwise be lost.

Before the tab disappears from your page

1. Open the tab while it still shows.
2. Copy every recommendation with its name and date.
3. Save the images and descriptions kept nowhere else.
4. Ask each writer before quoting them elsewhere.
5. Give each service a page on your website.
6. Decide whether Showcase Pages suit your audiences.
7. Post updates that link to those pages.

Step two cannot wait. Descriptions can be rewritten and images made again, but a recommendation lost with the tab is gone, and the client who wrote it may not write another.

Publishing articles under your own name on LinkedIn makes the same case for articles: the original on your own site, and a share on LinkedIn.

Frequently asked questions

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