As advertisers and marketers we are all familiar with the concept of promoted social media posts—mainly on Facebook and Twitter. But now, there’s another social platform that is paving the way for promoted posts. LinkedIn has recently announced that they will also offer businesses the opportunity to feature their messages in the homepage feed of selected users, beyond those who are already following the page.

With LinkedIn’s 225 million users, 3 million are company or organization pages. While the site has been slower to adopt this model of advertising, they have done so now with attention to the needs of businesses, with the intention that the ads will be more successful in their performance.

Current advertising on LinkedIn is displayed in the side bar of the site, but with the new integration of messaging in the main feed, businesses will benefit. Here are five great opportunities for companies on LinkedIn:

1. Greater Visibility and Engagement Increased levels of targeting and opportunities for engagement will make sponsored messages more noticeable to the prospective customer.
2. Customized Messaging With all of the options, companies can customize the messaging of their advertising for a wide variety of groups, budgets and objectives. This level of detail will set LinkedIn’s advertising apart from other social networking sites. Not only does this model serve businesses well, but also offers consumers more relevant content.
3. Targeted Ads Similar to other social networks, advertisers are able to target ads based on geography, age and gender. But, unique to LinkedIn, the ads can also be filtered for industry, seniority or job function.
4. Shareable, Likable Content Messages can now be “liked” or “shared,” the company can be followed, or the ad can be commented on.
5. Varying Paid Search Strategies Ads can be purchased on a PPC or CPC model.

Some companies have already begun to incorporate LinkedIn sponsored updates as part of their advertising mix, and they are seeing positive results. Data suggesting that companies who market content is particularly noteworthy—it’s showing increased authority, sales and social media following.

According to LinkedIn, marketers are working hard to produce good content for their customers, which can’t always been seen on their existing channels. The aim of the new sponsored updates is to allow companies to widen the net and extend their reach of potential consumers.