@nebell90
LinkedIn has been available to professional individuals for nearly a decade. Initially, the site began very small and grew slowly. As other social media outlets gained popularity LinkedIn worked to improve. The site opened up to students in addition to working professionals. Companies are now able to have pages. People and companies can post status updates. One feature that Facebook and Google+ had over LinkedIn was the ability to post updates to specific audiences. Google+ has it's circles, Facebook has it's lists, and now LinkedIn has Targeted Updates.
So what are the benefits of Targeted Updates? As a marketer overseeing our company page, I find this very exciting. We are working to update our page and add new features -- perfect timing for a new feature to be introduced! Targeted Updates allows you to send updates to specific subgroups of your followers. The post will show on the news feeds of those you choose, but be visible to everyone who visits your page. This means that the people who see the update are the ones most likely to be interested and engage with your company.
Targeted Updates gives you the availability to post to very specific groups based on their page information. Followers can be broken down through five categories: industry, job function, company size, geography and including/excluding company employees. Before posting you can sift through your followers to get a narrowed audience and create a higher chance of engagement.
The video below gives a quick explanation and tutorial for using LinkedIn Targeted Updates.