LinkedIn Boosts Company Profiles With Targeted Status Updates

LinkedIn’s new Targeted Status Updates are designed to give some 2 million marketers with LinkedIn Company Pages the ability to deliver highly personalized, more relevant content based on several targeting criteria: Industry, Seniority, Job Function, Company Size, Non-Company Employees, and Geography, as detailed in the above video.

The feature quietly launched in April with a handful of customers such as Philips, which saw a 106% increase in engagement after running Targeted Status Updates in their daily communications.

LinkedIn found that 67% of members follow a company to gain industry insights, 61% for company news, and 49% for the peer community. To help companies track the results of Targeted Status Updates and make better decisions about which followers to target, LinkedIn has also released a new “follower statistics” page tracking demographics and engagement over time.

Marketers can access Targeted Status Updates from social media management system HootSuite, with others following in the coming weeks. 

As for what else is coming, “A big part of our product focus and our roadmap in 2012 is on this notion of simplifying the site,” said CEO Jeff Weiner to Fortune. “And what we found last year, we went from a 1.0 version of our mobile application to a 2.0 version early in the fall of last year, and it was met with very positive reviews. 

“But more importantly it materially accelerated the rate of mobile adoption of LinkedIn's products and services. We went from 8 percent of visits to LinkedIn last March coming from mobile to 22 percent this year. And so one of the key takeaways was the simpler we can make our products, the more intuitive we can make our products, similar to what the team did in mobile, the more value we can unlock.”