• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 24, 2008

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has launched profiles of more than 160,000 companies to help members land jobs and climb the corporate ladder.

Unlike company or brand pages on MySpace or Facebook, LinkedIn's profiles aren't created by companies themselves as online marketing vehicles. Instead, they combine basic corporate information provided by BusinessWeek, such as company size and annual revenue, with LinkedIn's own data from members who work at the companies profiled.

That includes things like a list of company employees within a member's circle on LinkedIn, new hires and recent promotions (members who recently joined a given company or have been promoted within), and a list of executives who have the most profile views at their companies.

These are also people who may have appeared most often in the news, referenced in blogs and the result of searches within LinkedIn.

The company profiles also feature demographic data such as median age and job tenure and gender split, as well as most common job titles and top schools among members who are employees.

An icon will appear next to a company name wherever it appears in LinkedIn, alerting users to click on the name to link to the company profile.

While profiles generally don't carry advertising while still in beta, LinkedIn is working on ways for companies to advertise on their own pages. "But we'll never permit say, Google to advertise on Yahoo's company page," said LinkedIn spokesperson Krista Canfield.

Given the logic of adding company profiles to LinkedIn, why didn't the company launch them sooner? "We spent a lot of time talking to customers and companies in different industries so we could find out exactly what types of data and trends they thought would be interesting and useful in a company profile," Canfield said.

The move reflects wider efforts by LinkedIn to expand its offerings recently through a site redesign and a new developer platform that lets partners such as BusinessWeek add applications to the social network.

LinkedIn was the fastest-growing social site in February, with monthly traffic increasing by 275% to 7.4 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online. (MySpace had the most traffic overall at 55.4 million.)

LinkedIn says it has more than 20 million members worldwide, and executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. The average age of members is 41, and average household income is $109,000.