After a beta test beginning in April, LinkedIn has made its Targeted Status Updates available to the 2 million companies with LinkedIn Company Pages. Marketing wise, the Updates are an engagement tool, as well as a targeted-message tool. The aim of the Updates is to enable companies in LinkedIn's premium "Follow Company" program to target those followers with lead-generation-style drill-down demographics. This, claims LinkedIn, enables companies to communicate with followers in a personalized way, and provide content tailored to specific audiences. The Targeted Status Updates cost nothing to send for members of the Follow Company Program.

As Adweek describes, companies can target status updates on a rich set of demographics including seniority, job title, geography, company size, industry, even employee tenure. So a company can target, for example, vice-presidents of IT with more than five years in their current positions at companies of more than 500 employees, and with specific messages about enterprise software.

Salesforce.com was one of the 50 beta testers, and claimes Linkedin, used targeted updates to boost participation in offline events by 30%.
The targeted status updates are a feature of LinkedIn’s premium “Follow Company” program. Member companies pay LinkedIn per-follower, and depending upon the quality of the follower by demographics.
LinkedIn claims to have made it easier for company page administrators to track the effectiveness of their targeting efforts with a new follower insights page, which breaks down demographics, growth, and engagement of company followers (see graphic).

The company conducted a study to find that 67% of its members followed a company to gain industry insights, 61% for company news, and 49% for a company’s peer community (e.g., company alumni, or a software company’s user group).