LinkedIn is changing! 

 Did you know that the guys at LinkedIn have recently added a “Follow Company” feature, bringing it much more in line with Twitter and Facebook?

Most people haven’t bothered with setting up a Company Page on LinkedIn as it was just a place to re-iterate your services and any vacancies.

However, admins of Company Pages can now post status updates which will appear on your followers’ LinkedIn home pages,  just as your personal profile updates do. Does this sound like Facebook at all? You can add a link too (and a photo, as long as it has a url), although posts are limited to 500 characters.

Your followers can engage with your updates by Liking, Sharing or Commenting – this response will be seen by their networks, raising your brand profile and increasing your potential audience. This means that the more followers your company has got, the more exposure you’ll get.

To post a Company Status Update, you must be an Administrator of your Company Page, and your Company Page must be set to “Designated Admins only”. Having done that … you’ll get ‘insight’ equivalent data on the response to your update. After about a day, you’ll be able to see the impressions (views) and engagement (total interactions/ total impressions) for each status update.

So as well as having our own personal LinkedIn profiles, we now also need to spend some time getting our company’s profile right and to share new content here regularly via the status updates. It will be interesting to see how the big brands respond to this! Will they start to increase their current presence on LinkedIn now? It’s an easy place to reach the professionals and decision makers of companies the world over so it could be a wise move for them.

What do you think? How will you make the most of these new capabilities?