Apart from the horrendous amount of spam on LinkedIn groups, I'm a huge fan of the social network for business folks. Over the past few months they've unveiled quite a few new features for groups, including new analytics and a poll functionality.
This week however they turned their attention to Company Pages with the release of 'targeted status updates'. These will allow you to target your status updates to a particular audience based upon company size, industry, function, seniority, and geography.
All of which sounds great as it allows you to target your updates to just the kind of people that you want to see them. The theory goes that better targeting equals higher engagement because you get fewer irrelevant messages. See below for the release video.
I'm not convinced that many LinkedIn users hangout on the homepage, certainly not as many as do so on Facebook but LinkedIn do report a large improvement in engagement for the users that have had access to the tools thus far. If they could extend this functionality to things like Group Announcements then we'd really be flying.
LinkedIn makes for a great online CV reference point and networking tool, but the recruiters make it a hunting ground. As for Groups I have pretty much disengaged from them: no email updates, no digests, etc. because I was getting no value
And that is the key to any of this stuff: use it when it works for you, the way that it works and don't bother with the bits that don't! Not too much to complain about LinkedIn, really, from the overall perspective of the free service it provides.
Can't argue with that at all Daniel. Welcome to the blog.