Overview of LinkedIn’s New “Company Follow” Feature & How To Use It

Less than 2 months ago a little button was added to LinkedIn that you may have not noticed. The “Follow Company” button is one of the less noticeable changes LinkedIn has made in the last few months in an effort to improve the professional social network. Some of the more noticeable changes have been an upgrade to the face of groups, Integration with Twitter and Facebook on your LinkedIn wall and an upgrade to the face of the Answers section.

What does it do?

The “Company Follow” button allows you to publicly follow a company to keep a pulse on a few key things:

• Employees joining the company
• Employees leaving the company
• Employees being promoted
• New job opportunities
• Company profile updates

You can see all the above things when viewing a company’s profile but the point that it’s a great key step towards RSS style notifications. Rather then periodically checking to see if a change was made at a company you have your eye on, you can choose to be notified with daily or weekly updates of all the companies your following.

How To Follow a Company On LinkedIn

You can follow a company one of two ways:

On the home page, click on the “More” tab and then click the “Companies” button. Find the company you want to follow by searching for it in the search bar. Once your on that companies page, click on the “Follow Company” button located on the right side.

The second way you can follow a company is when you  are on someone’s profile. Hover your mouse over the company names on their profile and if the company has a page a small window will pop up with info and an option at the bottom for you to follow the company.

3 Ways to Use LinkedIn’s Company Follow Feature

1. Competitive Intelligence. By following your competitors, you can keep track on their turnover rates, new talent and any news going on in the company. Be careful though, Following companies is public knowledge. Anyone can see who your following.
2. Recruiters and People in transition: Great for keeping track of companies your interested in or have applied for. A word of caution. Don’t rely to heavily on getting updated here first. The updates are only updated when the people inside the company update them. Therefore, it may be too late when you see on LinkedIn that your favorite company is hiring. I’d use this in addition to other tools for keeping track of companies.
3. Prospecting: If your in sales actively pursuing a company, let that company know you have your eye on them. You can do this buy congratulating new hires or people with promotions.

What’s next? Hopefully this is a step towards LinkedIn users actually being able to interact with companies on their home pages. I want to see a way to post news on each company page or integration with the company blog. What do you think?