LinkedIn debuts Showcase Pages and launches tool to help brands better target content to followers

Update: This post has been updated to say that Showcase Pages are now open to every business.

LinkedIn is in the process of creating new features for its professional social network for companies to not only improve engagement with customers, but also convert them into potential hires.

Starting today, LinkedIn announced Showcase Pages that will segment and display content for specific audiences for companies. Moreover, a new recruitment tool has been developed called Talent Updates letting companies share status that are targeted to specific individuals to keep their business top-of-mind.

Extending the brand with Showcase Pages

With Showcase Pages, companies can better customize the content to appeal to the right audience. And the timing is right for it, especially coming more than a year after Company Pages were redesigned to help users find more information about a brand. These pages also now have analytics to help track follower growth and other metrics.

Now that the necessary pieces are in place, LinkedIn perhaps felt it was the most opportune time for companies to grow their presence on the social network. Showcase Pages enable any company to create dedicated pages for any of their brands, businesses, or initiatives — an example would be GAP setting up a Page for Banana Republic.

These pages are free to set up and open to every business. Companies like Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, and HP are already participating.

Here’s what Adobe has done: If you visit Adobe’s company page, there will be a section labeled “Other Adobe pages” and it currently lists Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud. For all intents and purposes, the Company Page is the same as it always has been. The difference is when you click on one of the other Adobe pages.

We clicked on “Adobe Creative Cloud” and it displays the Showcase Page where you have a banner image in the header, and status updates below.

Like with all other Pages, LinkedIn users can subscribe to receive notifications about activity for a Showcase Page. Any updates will be displayed in a user’s feed, whether it’s on a desktop, smartphone, or tablet device.

TNW set up our own Showcase Page for Academy news — here’s what it looks like:

Keeping potential hires interested in a company

Besides Showcase Pages, LinkedIn is also launching a new feature called Talent Updates that will allow companies to better engage their most interested followers. The professional social networking company estimates that 70 percent of a brands followers are interested in open job positions there — Talent Updates aims to address this.

Using this new feature, companies can share status updates with their followers. When those users visits the social network again, they’ll see the notifications in their feed. Recruiters will be able to note who has engaged with it, whether it’s liking, sharing, or commenting. From then on, the ones that are becoming evangelists can be contacted to see if they would like to discuss a permanent role with the company.

Talent Updates are billed as a new way to reach passive candidates. A company knows that its followers are interested since they follow its Page, but instead of spamming them with incessant messages that may not appear to be authentic, LinkedIn is giving recruiters an opportunity to do so in a manner that will hopefully be more comfortable.

Interestingly, this is the latest addition to LinkedIn’s arsenal of tools that it gives recruiters. It joins the Work With Us job feature for mobile, an iOS app to help recruiters manage candidates, and the launch of its CheckIn app which allows recruiters to gather candidate info at career fairs.

Talent Updates is only available for English-speaking users of the Recruiter service at this point.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images