On Thursday, September 6, Linked In announced plans to slowly roll out an updated version of its company pages. Though the redesign is currently only available to a select few companies, the changes will become available to all business pages in the near future.
The redesign comes as part of a broader initiative by LinkedIn to simplify its interface and core focus. As such, users will immediately notice that the new pages are cleaner, easier to navigate, and more image-focused.
What to expect from the new design
LinkedIn Cover Photo
The old LinkedIn Business Pages featured the about section, the newsfeed, and company quick information such as the company size and industry. These are all very text heavy elements making the pages appear busy and overwhelming.
The old Apple company page shows the text-heavy old design.
Following the lead of Facebook and Google Plus, LinkedIn has introduced a banner-like cover photo to the company pages. Not only does this visual element give your eyes a chance to rest, but it also provides an excellent opportunity for companies to better brand themselves.
Hewlett-Packard updated their LinkedIn page to include a cover image.
Products and Services More Prominently Featured
The “Products and Services” page had been one of the most underutilized features of LinkedIn pages. Especially for B2B businesses, it is a great platform to pitch there services directly to those who are most interested in them and get recommendations from their users. However, with the old LinkedIn design, it was hidden in a small tab on the homepage.
The old LinkedIn company page design hid the products and services page in a small tab.
Luckily, it seems LinkedIn realized that this feature was being overlooked because the new layout offers an overview of the Products and Services page on the company home page.
LinkedIn now shows Products and services in the sidebar of the homepage.
Focused Newsfeed
A final notable feature of the new LinkedIn company pages is the updated newsfeed. Where as the old newsfeed was displayed in reverse chronological order, the new newsfeed will display content based on an algorithm – much like that of Facebook – that will sort updates based on how likely they are to be relevant to each user. Though visually it is very similar to the old newsfeed, LinkedIn hopes that the new algorithm will make the newsfeed more relevant to its users by displaying the content most interesting to them.
What You’ll Love
Better branding
The new LinkedIn cover photo gives the pages a much more personalized touch. Companies can use this space to visually show their audience what there brand is about. It is also a great area to display new products, market and event, or introduce a new service.
Simplified Navigation
By highlighting key features and eliminating a number of unnecessary features including the various widget options, LinkedIn has created a much more user-friendly design. And hopefully with the new newsfeed algorithm, users can more quickly find the content that most interests them.
Mobile integration
Previously, LinkedIn company pages were only available within your browser. However, 23% of LinkedIn’s unique visitors came from their mobile apps. Finally, LinkedIn has integrated company pages with their iOS and Android mobile apps. This is especially important considering mobile web use has been steadily accelerating since 2009 and mobile traffic is only expected to increase.
What You Might Not Love
Although the addition of the cover image is definitely a step in the right direction, LinkedIn took an interesting approach to integrating it. The space taken up by the cover photo used to be occupied by the about section, a key feature of a linked in page. Rather than simply putting the about section under the cover image, LinkedIn moved it to the very bottom of the page, below the Company Updates. Considering many visitors go to a LinkedIn page to learn about a company, this might not be the most user-friendly design decision.
Overall, the new LinkedIn company pages better highlight some of the key features of LinkedIn (the “about section” aside) and are much more customizable. We can’t wait to update Clix’s LinkedIn page.
If you’d like to learn more about the updates you can visit the Linkedin blog.
