LinkedIn Brand Pages Get More Sharing

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LinkedIn has made its 11-month old Company Pages product more agile for marketers' needs. The San Francisco Internet company now lets brands update their status and share it with followers on the networking site, which, according to LinkedIn, is home to 2 million company pages.

Similar to the way Twitter works, if users follow a brand, they will begin seeing updates from the company in their LinkedIn feed. The users will be able to comment on the update, "like" it, and share the message with their network. Those who do not follow a brand can still read its updates by tapping an "Overview" button when visiting a firm's LinkedIn page.

Page administrators can feed out company news through the same Overview tab. Such status updates are limited to 500 characters, while potentially including URLs and multimedia.

In conjunction with Advertising Week, LinkedIn today also debuted its Certified Developer Program, including launch partners Buddy Media, AKQA, HootSuite, and Wildfire.

Buddy Media told ClickZ News that adding the LinkedIn platform to its Conversion Buddy product should attract B2C and B2B marketers who want to measure messaging on the professionals networking site. Up until now, the New York-based vendor has primarily focused on Facebook marketing products, while also offering Twitter solutions.

"For Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it will give marketers a nice cross-platform view," said Joe Ciarallo, Buddy Media spokesperson.

Meanwhile yesterday, Linked announced that it had purchased the one-year-old social CRM company Connected. An alternative to SalesForce, Connected's set of tools lets users manage their contacts from Gmail, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.