LinkedIn has recently launched a number of new share features so that now, in addition to Q&As, groups and personal messages, you can send images, article excerpts, blog posts and other content to your professional connections.

Here are a few ways you can maximise the benefits of LinkedIn shares for your business:

1. Keep Consistent

By posting once a day, and syndicating that post to your business’ Twitter and Facebook accounts, you’ll remain fresh in the minds of your connections and customers. Relevant and valuable content will be appreciated and re-shared. Space out your LinkedIn shares to maximize their value for your network.

2. Find New Talent

If you’re expanding your team, LinkedIn is one of the largest and fastest-growing resources for finding the perfect candidate. Write a brand-appropriate blog post giving very specific details on the kind of person you’re looking for. Give your post a simple, sharable headline that contains the company name and position available.

3. Get Feedback

If you’ve got ideas you want to run by your peers or a nagging business problem that needs a solution, LinkedIn groups and Q&A are popular and effective ways to get feedback. Sharing allows you to cross-post your query across multiple networks and add supporting data such as a picture or website link.

4. Promote Your Events

Whether you’re going to a charity dinner or hosting a meet up for your clients, LinkedIn shares can be great for raising community awareness, driving participation or soliciting volunteers or donations. It’s completely acceptable to ask others to re-share the content across their own networks, particularly if it’s a local event geared towards your own community.

5. Spread Your Word

If you’ve got an article or blog post you’re particularly proud of, LinkedIn sharing can be a great way to broadcast that content to your network. Be sure to include a personal comment on why you’re sharing the link, and tailor the extract to include something descriptive and appealing.

LinkedIn has introduced a new "Follow Company" feature as a way to (unsurprisingly) follow companies on LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn users can simply follow organisations to see their latest happenings.

With LinkedIn being the professional network that it is, the new feature will offer users a tremendous amount of potential for networking and job opportunities of interest.

It will now offer more value in concrete, real-world career building than say; following someone on Twitter or becoming ‘friends’ on Facebook - not to say that there isn’t still value in these cases as well.

LinkedIn's, Ryan Roslansky explained:  "The new feature lets you tap into key goings-on at nearly a million companies that already have their company profiles on LinkedIn and more that are being created every day."

"Most importantly, this feature can deliver insights – you may be surprised at – such as the pace of hiring at your nearest competitor or the start of a whole new industry as you see web technology companies hiring geography teachers (for e.g.). Or better yet, you may find the job of a lifetime to do cause marketing for Major League Baseball," he adds.

There are a couple ways to follow a company on LinkedIn. You can go to any member's LinkedIn profile, and if a member is/was affiliated with a company, you can mouse-over it and click "Follow Company", or you can follow the company from its own profile page.

The Follow Company feature makes so much sense for LinkedIn, now that it's here; it's hard to believe it hasn't been around for longer. This is essentially the basic blueprint for how social networking works now.

When you think about traffic-driving social networks, LinkedIn may not be the first that comes to mind. The truth is it probably won’t drive the kind of traffic Twitter or Facebook will for your site but with many sites declaring it to be an extremely valuable traffic tool; you can’t afford to ignore it.

LinkedIn reportedly has about 65 million members; not as many as Facebook’s 400 million but LinkedIn brings a different brand of relevance to the table.

Entrepreneurs such as Lewis Howes have claimed that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs and frequently talks about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic, saying “You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site. It will only continue to grow in time..."

LinkedIn has announced some changes to its news sharing options, and some of them just may help content spread more like it would on Twitter, these include:

1. Users now get complete control over who sees what they're sharing
   
2. Facebook-style images and excerpts that can increase click through potential
3. Display images and excerpts with shared content - help with driving traffic with LinkedIn
4. Preview, edit, and delete options for your posts and status updates to prevent typos
5. LinkedIn's version of the retweet - just click a button and share content with connections, groups or individuals. This could be a huge factor for traffic. 
6. The URL shortener (Lnkd.in) which LinkedIn calls this a companion to its Twitter integration
7. Re-shared articles give credit by attributing something you re-share to the person who shared it with you.
8. If a user chooses to make shared items public, they will appear on their profile.
   

A lot of people still don't generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic, and their perception of it is more like a resume or a way to get a job.  When you go on LinkedIn what you need to look at is the powerful tools that allow you to drive traffic back to your site.

LinkedIn has recently launched some new integration that can only help with a user's traffic strategy - notably, integrations with Twitter and Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow your network as well. The Twitter integration obviously lets you tap into the following you already have on Twitter, which has already proven to be a significant traffic-driving tool.