LinkedIn is a still-evolving and sometimes overlooked platform in the social media world. It is a channel best suited for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing and is much more than a place where job seekers and employers connect.

LinkedIn has always been more utilitarian in some ways than its social media counterparts and hasn’t been as focused on a shiny user experience. Its updates aren’t touted with slick keynotes streamed via the Web; it’s rather modest. Yet it is a valuable platform for B2B marketing.

LinkedIn just announced some changes for companies that are worth noting, even if they weren’t all over your Google news feed. The new improvements focus on expanded analytics for companies and the ability to target updates.

LinkedIn explained all the changes on its company blog with a recent post and accompanying video: “Enabling More Relevant Conversations between Companies and Followers” http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/19/targeted-status-updates/. If you are a company page administrator or follow a company, this is news worth following.

The features were previously available only to a group of beta testers. Here is how things look now:

Analytics:  Companies can get not only gross numbers of followers, but also trends for the past 7 days. They also include more information about the demographics of followers, a list of most recent followers, and page statistics such as recent “engagement” benchmarks for content posted by a company.

Targeted Updates: Instead of just posting one update to “All followers,” a company can select groups of followers for a given update by choosing “Targeted audience.” This can include/exclude employees of the posting company, as well as criteria of: company size, industry, function, seniority and geography.

The features are worth exploring and allow a company to target and test all the content it publishes.