LinkedIn wants to become more of a professional publishing platform. On Tuesday they followed through by introducing a new feature called Showcase Page allowing businesses on the professional networking site to target the fans of a specific product or brand. They are intended to work more or less like the already existing Company Pages with the difference being that they enable more niche marketing, targeting a specific audience rather than all of your followers.

As a company you can create up to 10 Showcase Pages for free (although LinkedIn has hinted that they will accomodate larger companies with more if needed). And of course you can support those pages with the usual follower ads and sponsored updates. LinkedIn -after all – needs to make some money.

And LinkedIn will offer a built-in analytics program so you can track the success of your pages. To round it off, the pages look great visually! Microsoft and Adobe have already started to use this new feature and the pages are being rolled out to all users over the next few days. I will definitely be trying it for some of my clients.