LinkedIn have been beavering away over the past few months making subtle improvements to their channel. The two stand out innovations are the ‘Ads by LinkedIn Members’ and the company status update.

One of the most pressing conundrums in B2B social marketing is working out ways to seed the content you’re creating into places where people are genuinely interested and grateful to receive it. Creating compelling content with the right company isn’t the problem; trying to share it in an organic way without looking like you’re spamming is. The process is time consuming and very manual.

Twitter has been taken to by many organisations, but developing a following is a notoriously tough task especially if you’re dealing in an industry that doesn’t have the glamour of, say, a consumer electronics brand or dot com start-up.

Even if you can develop a following, how can you put a value on them? You garner very little data from the micro-blogging site and from personal experience, click through rates from Twitter are incredibly poor (from a highly engaged passionate following of 11,500, only about 3.5% click through to my site when I post a blog).

Facebook has always been a questionable avenue for true B2B organisations to share content; it’s not really the space for it- a bit like discussing utility bills in a night club. The outcome of this is that generally, the best place to share content has been industry specific forums and specialist LinkedIn groups.

Well, that might just have changed with the new status update function.

Businesses can be followed by LinkedIn members who are interested in what they do (not exactly new). What is new is that those businesses can take a place in a members news feed and share content in a status updates. Companies can now engage with potential clients as an entity and their content can be distributed more organically.

What makes this even more exciting is that you can put a value on who is seeing your content because LinkedIn analytics (as well as manual investigation) allows you break down your following by seniority, job title and industry.

There is now an opt-in platform to share without spamming (not that we ever did of course)! Becoming social as a business is fast becoming unavoidable. Setting up a company page is only half the battle, the onus is now on businesses to create relevant content and to make use of the space or run the risk of competitors stealing a march.

Combine this exciting communication upgrade with the ability to promote your company page in the same targeted way you can market to users interests using Facebook ad platform, well, you’ve got a recipe for some mighty fine B2B social communication!

@Peterwood33