Looks like LinkedIn is keen to emulate Facebook and Twitter with some of the recent changes the platform has made. The big change was to the “Follow Company” feature that now looks a lot like Twitter and Facebook.
Here’s Steve Olenksi over on Social Media Today talking about the recent changes on LinkedIn :
“You’re a company and you post status updates, links, articles, photos, videos, to your followers &  fans. Meanwhile over on LinkedIn your company profile is fairly bland. You can post job openings and post some “stuff” about your company such as your services. But a status update? No, for that you had to go to Facebook and Twitter.
Well not any more…
Thanks to the aforementioned changes, admins of company profiles on LinkedIn can post real, honest-to-goodness status updates and actually include a link! No photo sharing available, yet. Well that’s not entirely true. You can post photos as long as they attached to a link, rather than just uploading a photo as you would via Facebook or Twitter. This is very exciting for now all updates you make to your company status will appear on your follower’s LinkedIn home page. Your followers will have the option to Like, Share or Comment on your status update and in turn this “engagement” will also be seen by all of your followers’ respective networks, providing your company, your brand with a whole new and expanded audience.
So just as your company or your brand gets more exposure when one of your fans or followers share something via Facebook or Twitter to their followers/their network, the same will hold true for LinkedIn. So the need to get more followers for your company and brand just went up… way up –  for the more followers your company has, the more chance for expanded exposure within the LinkedIn world.
Here’s a couple of key points to keep in mind about the new changes to the “Follow Company” feature:

  • Followers of your Company will see the Status Updates on their homepage (when they login to LinkedIn) or by going to your Company’s “Overview” tab. Each Follower’s network will also have an opportunity to see the posts- as long as the follower comments, likes, or shares.
  • In order 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”.
  • Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces).
  • You will be able to see impressions and engagement on each Company Status Update. An impression = views of the status update. Engagement = total interactions (comments, likes, clicks, shares)/total impressions. This data appears approximately 24 hours after an update is published and will continue to update on a daily basis.
  • Businesses that post an excessive amount are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their page deleted.”

So what do you think? We know that LinkedIn is where the professionals are and some of us want to reach the key decision makers. Now in addition to our own personal LinkedIn profiles, we have the potential of using our company profile to share content via the status updates. Regardless as to whether you’re a B2B marketer or B2C marketer or an advertiser or a brand or whatever… your company profile just got a whole lot more important. And you need to make sure you integrate LinkedIn with your Facebook and Twitter accounts for there may be a whole slew of people you may not reach via Facebook or Twitter but you could via LinkedIn.
For us here at Saucy Horse this is key – we’re working now on ensuring our clients are maximising their LinkedIn presence now that there’s a real expansion in what’s offered by the platform. The key is HOW we’re going to use it, and to ensure we don’t overload our profiles & company pages, because for me, that’s incredibly irritating and I’m interested to watch and learn – who will get it right and who will make the biggest mistakes?
You can read Steve Olenski’s full article on Linkedin here.