Unlocking LinkedIn for local businesses: A Missed opportunity for service providers

As a small local business being found by people who are looking for your services is key. Sure, we all do or should have the Google my business page, our website with a Blog page and do local SEO. Some, like us, have an Instagram page to promote their services, a Youtube channel, X and all other social media to try to get the word out and help not only the small business, but also people who want to use the services of a local small business. 

If you, like me, have a business and it is local, and I know many of you do, you will work hard to try to use everything available to you to grow your business. Now, I have been on Linkedin for years, and have never really found a way to leverage this to its full extent for my small business and have tried may expensive options. 

So imagine how excited I got when I saw on @linkedin the “for business” box in the top right hand corner. I clicked and saw services for market place, intrigued I decided to take a look and see what this was all about. 

This lands you on a page with the title of “Take your projects from to-do to done” and under that it reads “search for services”. This got me a little excited! (Does not take a lot these days.!) I thought wow, I can really use this as I know Linkedin has a ton of property managers, realtors, building maintenance people on here who may use this to search for window cleaning, pressure washing, low/soft pressure washing services (to remove mold) and gutter cleaning. I am thinking, this is where these people hang out!

Awesome, I thought this is just what I have been looking for, a way to be found by people on here who can use my services locally, heading out the door to the Porsche dealership, I thought, hang on I better look into this a bit more before I start picking out colors! And Imagine my disappointment when the only businesses that are listed are the ones who already drive the Porsches! Graphic design, Marketing, Public Relations, Law, Finance, Consulting ETC.

All was not lost however, as I scrolled down I saw “ Are you a provider” YES I shouted! (That excitement thing again!) and hurriedly clicked on the get started button, alas this too soon led to disappointment. You have to choose from the pre-listed services, of which none were for any of the services I could offer for people who are looking for them in #Austin, www.apluswcs.com  (shameless plug!) We all have to earn a living! You could even put a button on our profile page, a button that people can use to FIND you! DENIED! 

So not being one to give up, I thought, this must have been an oversight from the high-ups @linkedin, and if I could just find a way to contact them, they would surely understand and fix this. So contact them I did, and I got a reply! 

“At this time, cleaning services are not available within the service market place, however I have passed along this feedback to our product team for their review”

Now, roughly translated, this means no, But I persisted, and in fairness, I got another reply:

“Thanks for getting back to me. I have not got the ability to write new services. Any new service has to be built into the site as on the back end; there are several major systems this is connected through.” 

I thought he should go to the service marketplace and look for web development. There are 633,789 results for that! (I'm not kidding.) He could find someone to get this done! 

I tried to reason one last time, but the final email came back saying, “They are slowly building out the list.”

To put this into context for everyone, what does it mean to a small business when they can connect with and bid on a regular cleaning job at a commercial property? It’s huge!! It’s what these type of platforms can do for small business which in turn helps us grow, hire more people, and upgrade equipment, it makes it all worth while. Having the ability for a #buildingfacilitiesmanager #propertymanager,#realestatebroker etc, who is looking to do business with someone locally to be able to find us on Linkedin, well it’s massive, and I am sure it’s not just me that would greatly benefit from this being available to us. 

Come on LinkedIn, get your game on, and help window cleaners drive a @Porsche, too! (Hey, you never know!) 

Please comment below and let me know your thoughts on this. Are you a small business owner who could also benefit from this?