About just over two months ago LinkedIn took a radical and (may I add) irrational decision to remove the service and product pages from its business profiles. This caused such a sensation on the web that even if you look for the term ‘service and product pages‘ the LinkedIn issue comes up first in Google results. But why is this development so shocking?
Up until now, LinkedIn was the only social network that maintained a healthy balance between value content and advertising. Part of this was the company ‘service and product pages’ which you could invite your clients to give you a recommendation on. You can imagine how hundreds of thousands of businesses across the world rushed to complete their profile and add recommendations when LinkedIn introduced this feature not long ago. Their subsequent anger at the deletion of their work is well documented.
LinkedIn took a bigger decision than it first seemed when it removed them. Firstly they showed a level of arrogance towards businesses by avoiding any discussion on this matter. They made no effort to migrate the recommendations or save the content elsewhere. Secondly and most importantly they committed social suicide by turning LinkedIn into a glorified TotalJobs. Because all that is left now is people looking for work (occasionally) and companies recruiting. The reasons for participation from a business development point of view have been minimised. This includes updating LinkedIn for anything else apart from new positions. But most critically it also means that it diminishes the value of LinkedIn ads. Because if the intent is to find a job on the site, then most other products and services that are not closely related become obsolete as a point of interest.
It is common knowledge that increasingly LinkedIn is making its money from recruitment. However, this bold aggressive move brings more major issues. If companies cannot use LinkedIn but just for recruitment purposes what is their incentive in allowing employee participation? The question for LinkedIn job seekers is, ‘Would you still visit LinkedIn if not looking for a job’? How would this impact on content creation?
Don’t get me wrong, I think TotalJobs is a great site. But I would not call it a social network.
