LinkedIn Quick Tip: “Company Follow” Now Works Better

Back in April, LinkedIn rolled out a new feature called Company Follow. Similar to Facebook’s fan pages, Company Follow lets you track companies on the professional networking site to stay up to date on their key developments, potential business opportunities and job leads.

Now, LinkedIn has released a few updates to Company Follow to provide followers with additional access to company profiles—and offer companies more flexibility in what they choose to share with their followers.

Here’s what you need to know about Company Follow’s three new features.

1. Improved customization and interface.

To find Company Follow, log in to your LinkedIn account, choose “More…” from the toolbar and select “Companies.” Here, you can search for companies to follow and view a list of companies you have already elected to follow.

[For more LinkedIn tips, tricks and analysis, visit CIO.com’s LinkedIn Bible.]

Select the company to view a profile. On this newly redesigned page you’ll see a description of the company, people in your network who are employed by that company, new hires, LinkedIn activity, mentions of the company in the news and more. The new design looks clean and easy to navigate.

2. More personalized, insightful statistics.

On a company’s profile page, look to the right-side column and choose “Check out insightful statistics about employees.” Here, you can see the company’s job function composition, years of work experience, highest educational degree attained and most common universities attended. Other statistics include annual company growth (in terms of employees compared on a graph to employees at similar companies); recent employee departures; companies that current employees worked at before joining the current one, and more.

These statistics provide “a very unique perspective on how the company has evolved on LinkedIn over time,” says Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn. “This information can come in very handy for professionals ranging from job seekers to those in business development.”

3. New “Career” tab for companies and professionals.

Next to the “Overview” tab is a “Careers” tab—a new addition to Company Profiles. In this tab, companies provide you with information about their hiring practices and employee-written reflections about their experiences working for the company. Companies can also list open jobs that LinkedIn tailors to your profile.

Note that since this feature is still new, not all companies will have added information to the Careers tab.

Kristin Burnham covers Consumer Technology, SaaS, Social Networking and Web 2.0 for CIO.com. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kmburnham. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline. Email Kristin at kburnham@cio.com.