The LinkedIn company pages are largely under-utilised in my opinion.  Every brand has a Facebook page for instance that they use to talk to their fans or followers, but a much lower number take advantage of the company pages on LinkedIn.  To some extent that has been justifiable as the range of tools available on LinkedIn have paled in comparison.

LinkedIn are slowly pulling their finger out though and this week released a couple of new tools for Company Page marketers.  The first was a new service called Targeted Updates.  This will allow marketers to send a specific message to specific followers.  You'll have the ability to target followers based on specific criteria, including industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees and geography.  New product announcements to buyers, software updates to users, job announcements to college grads who don’t already work for your company, etc.

The second new service is Follower Statistics.  This is a basic analytics service that will give you insight into who is interacting with your content.  Not only will companies be able to view their follower count, but they can now also track engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, percentage engagement as well as follower demographic information.

As experienced Facebook Page owners will know, none of this is really out of the ordinary, but it's a nice addition to bring LinkedIn up to speed.  As seems common on LinkedIn, the features aren't available to all yet but they're going to be rolled out fully over the coming weeks.