After testing the feature among a small sampling of customers, LinkedIn has released targeted status updates for LinkedIn company pages. The new feature gives page admins the ability to personalize the content that they deliver to their page audience, while LinkedIn members receive more relevant information from the companies they follow.
The targeted status updates allow you to specify a number of parameters, including company size, industry, function, seniority and geography. By narrowing the audience for a particular status update, you can tailor your LinkedIn content strategy and deliver more relevant messaging to a specified group of users.
To begin experimenting with the new feature, simply head over to your LinkedIn company page. Under the status window, click the drop-down menu under Share with: All followers, then select Targeted Audience (as pictured below).
You also have the option to choose from “Employees and non-employees” and “Non-employees only.” Let’s say you want to promote a job opening, for example. You could try tailoring the message to “Non-employees only” in a certain industry and geographical area. Not only will your audience reap the benefit of receiving content that’s more specifically tailored to them, but you’ll also increase the chance of successful results (depending on the content of your messaging, of course).
Because no content marketing or community management tool would be complete without analytics, you’ll be happy to know (as we were) that LinkedIn’s targeted status updates are included on your insights page so that you can track demographics, growth and engagement.
You never know—you just may see results like Philips, which, according to the LinkedIn blog, “saw a 106 percent increase in engagement by followers after running targeted status updates in their daily communications with members.”
In this day and age, it’s important to not only deliver timely, compelling content to your online audience—it’s also critical that the content is relevant, too. And even if your messages won’t be seen by your whole audience, you’ll likely find that your overall content marketing efforts are more successful when you deliver customized information and messages that are a better fit for certain segments of your viewership.
We’re in the midst of exploring targeted status updates for our clients, and we suspect you might be doing the same. Feel free to share your experience so far in the comments!
Image by Rob Ellis’ via Creative Commons
