LinkedIn recently announced the introduction of product pages—the ability for brands to create pages to highlight specific products. The big question for brands is: “worth it,or a waste of time”? Call me crazy, but I’m going with the latter. In fact, as I work with and monitor my own accounts as well as client accounts I’m very cognizant of the potential to dilute brand messages by using too many channels. 

Yes, sending multiple messages in multiple ways is a good communication strategy and has been long before the advent of social media. But there is a balance to be struck and, perhaps, a tipping point where one more channel simply becomes too much for your audience and they give up. Make it too difficult to connect with and follow you and why make the effort?

We’ve been working with and researching social media for quite some time now and work regularly with clients to help them identify and leverage the right social media (and other) communication tools to meet their business objectives. One key in this process, we believe, is ensuring that all of the various channels being used are working together toward one specific strategy or purpose.

For that reason, I am somewhat skeptical about the value of this new option (as I have been about LinkedIn business pages in general). Why? Because I believe there is the potential that these tools could dilute the impact of an organization or individual’s web site.

Those who use social media— or any other communication tool—need to be cautious about fragmenting their communication channels and messages. Make it too difficult for your target audiences to determine how, where and when to connect with you and they’ll simply opt out.

It is possible, I suppose, that there may come a time when options like this might replace web pages as we know them (although the barrier here is that most businesses are loathe to give up the control and ownership that such a shift would suggest). But, for now, my advice is to proceed with caution. Make sure you have a clearly defined strategy for your communications, by audience, and select the tools you will use wisely.

Tags: Brand Management, linkedin, Social Media, Strategic Planning, Strategy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 at 9:45 am and is filed under Marketing and Branding, Strategic Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.