Why LinkedIn’s latest changes prove that it’s like Batman

I clearly mean “The Dark Knight Rises” Batman; not “Original Grey Suit with Yellow Belt” Batman. The professional social media platform had made a significant change to its status updates for companies.

LinkedIn has always been the forgotten social network — mainly because of its unwavering dedication to the professional. This means that it has not always been popular with the masses who adopt social technologies quickly; but that has not stopped it from reaching north of 100-million registered users.

LinkedIn has made some rather interesting updates to its platform recently though; and it’s taken a rather large leaf out of the books of Facebook and Twitter while throwing a ton of business relevance behind it. Essentially what it has done is allowed businesses to target their status updates to specific audiences (huge relevancy points there).

In the image above the status can be made to either all of those who follow that company; or specifically to a group of individuals who fall within a later specified demographic.

Do you see why I said this was huge?

You can break down your audience into the following demographics: company size, industry, function, seniority or geography. The only catch is that your company needs to have more than 100 followers as LinkedIn will only send targeted status updates to demographics that have targeted at least 100 people.

When the status update gets posted to your specified audience, it will appear on their feed page as you make the update and it will also reflect on your home page.

Another excellent inclusion in this update is that you can either remove or include employees in to your targeted status update. This will allow you to either see your exact reach numbers of potential clients; or increase that number by including your staff and getting them to on share your post to their audience.

Still not enough?

Twenty-four hours after you have made your targeted post; you can go back to it and there will be some metrics that allow you to judge how well or poorly your update has fared. These metrics will include:

• Targeted audience size: how many people you actually sent the message to
• Impressions: how many people actually saw the update (not just targeted audience)
• Clicks: How many clicked on a link within the message
• Shares: How many of your targeted audience then on shared your post to their audience
• Engagement: this percentage lets you see how well engaged your audience was with your post

Still want more?

In the second part of its update, it is giving you additional insight into the demographics of your company’s total audience with the “follower statistics” tab.

With this information you will now be able to see at which level you need to pitch your offering, or in fact if you are already pitching it correctly. For instance if your following is too junior for the product or service you are offering then you need to change how and what you are saying.

One of the biggest things that this change does put in to perspective though is that LinkedIn is seriously saying that a company following is vitally important — one could say almost more so than a group following.

To be honest this is not going to catapult LinkedIn ahead of the other networks by any stretch, but it is going to make them even more relevant to anyone seriously marketing from business to business who understands where LinkedIn fits into his or her social strategy.