LinkedIn members now see updates from companies they follow -- including job opportunities, employee moves and breaking news -- when they sign on to the professional networking service.

The updates are limited to 500 characters. LinkedIn says "tens of millions of professionals" have followed more than 2M company profiles since the feature was added in April 2010.

In contrast, Facebook's Pages let companies post up to 5K characters, and businesses have been able to post updates that appear in follower's news feeds since Pages launched in November 2007.

For those who follow many companies, these new status updates will start taking over their LinkedIn page, but there is no way to reduce the stream unless they unfollow businesses.

"While we do not offer the ability to hide/unhide certain company status updates at this time, there are customized options in your account settings to manage general updates you would like to see/not see on your home page newsfeed for activities across LinkedIn," a LinkedIn spokesperson told LAUNCH via email.

LinkedIn, which has positioned itself as a premier business networking solution, generated more than $58.6M in revenue from hiring solutions in Q2 2011, nearly half of LinkedIn's total revenue for the quarter.

Now executive chairman, Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in 2003. The Silicon Valley-based professional network raised more than $352M when it went public in May.

Users have complained about difficulties downgrading their paid LinkedIn accounts [ see our story ].

Additionally, members with more than 250 connections cannot close their own accounts and must go through LinkedIn's customer service [ see our story ].

SCREENSHOTS

To unfollow a company's updates hover over its post and an unfollow button will appear in the top right corner of the update.

CONTACTS & LINKS

LinkedIn
Website: http://www.linkedin.com
Blog: blog.linkedin.com
Twitter: @linkedin

Reid Hoffman
Google+: https://plus.google.com/103657641753349471053/
Twitter: @quixotic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reid-Hoffman/119543221425657
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman

LAUNCH Blog