Throughout my time in the Business school, I learned many things about marketing, finance, accounting, management and even some computer sciences. While all these topics are different, one thing my professors always seemed to bring up, regardless of the class, was the importance of LinkedIn. At least once throughout a term there was a guest speaker in one of my classes that showed students how to properly utilize their LinkedIn page. While I do use LinkedIn, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot to know about LinkedIn as a resource and there is always some new feature you could be utilizing.
For those of you who are not familiar with LinkedIn, it is a networking website for professionals. It allows users to not only showcase their skills from past and current jobs, but also maintain relationships or “connections” with people they have met in the workplace. With more than 259 million users throughout 200 countries, LinkedIn is also a great resource for both users and companies in the hiring process. Users can search thousands of job posting and even have the ability to be notified when a company they are interested in is hiring. As for companies, LinkedIn is a great resource to find potential candidates and make new connections. With so many different capabilities, I think it is safe to say that LinkedIn is yet another tool to market either yourself or a company.
Since the current social media trend is to allow for advertisements or promoted pages, why not add this to LinkedIn as well? Recently, LinkedIn has launched a new feature for 
businesses – showcasing. This feature segments followers on Company Pages and makes sure the right messages and information are being sent to the correct audiences. Basically, a Showcase Page allows companies to represent their brands, business units and marketing initiatives beyond just representing their business on their Company Page. As users search for a company, sponsored blogs, videos, updates and other company content is targeted towards specific types of users.
The Showcase feature also allows companies to highlight their relationships and connections with other businesses, which ultimately will allow for growth within a Company Page and develop more of a presence within the LinkedIn community. Since many larger companies have started using the showcase feature on their company pages, I’m sure it will not be long before all companies jump on the showcase bandwagon as well.
In today’s business world, good marketing techniques are one of the keys to being successful. Through using LinkedIn’s Showcase Page, companies are gaining another valuable marketing tool, on a major social network, with the ability to focus their content to specific users. Check it out!
Read more: LinkedIn Marketing Strategy: Leveraging Polls and Events