Yesterday, LinkedIn officially rolled out their much anticipated Targeted Status Updates feature for all 2 million companies who have LinkedIn Company Pages. LinkedIn has actually had the targeting feature in beta since April with a few select companies, so with the increasing desire for marketers to want to tailor their content for their various niche audiences, this update comes at a great time.
The big question though is, how does this actually benefit the typical B2B company who maybe has a smaller yet growing Company Page following?
Our team here at Weidert Group quickly dove into the new set of features yesterday for our own Company Page, and at first glance we loved the new Follower Statistics that are available that tell us how many new followers we've added in the past 7 days, as well as total impressions, impressions per status update and follower engagement for that same 7 day period. There's also some helpful new graphs that are populated for a more visual view into both Follower Statistics and Page Statistics.
As for the much anticipated feature of specifying a target audience for a specific page update, LinkedIn allows you to segment by company size, Industry, Function, Seniority and Geography. The only catch that we quickly discovered is the fact your update must target at least 100 followers. This was an instant buzz kill for our team since even though we have 274 followers of our company page, once you begin to segment the audience we're quickly below the 100 follower limit.
There's obviously reasons LinkedIn set this limit by design. One theory is this is more incentive for marketers to continue to leverage their Company Page to grow their overall following to a number that makes sense to segment. But with that said, this quickly eliminates a lot of companies from leveraging this feature when they could benefit from segmenting their updates to their various audiences, even if it's sent to only 25 people. Those could be the right 25 people!
As we all know in the world of online marketing and social media marketing, things continuously evolve. It's possible as more companies experience this same road block with the audience segmentation requirement and then voice their disappointment, LinkedIn may make some modifications to this rule. Only time will tell, but for now companies should dig into learning more about their followers and page performance from the updated statistics that are available. This still offers value on learning what content is attracting attention and engagement.
Topics: Social Media
