• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 13, 2019

LinkedIn on Tuesday announced a new targeting category to the LinkedIn Partner Program. Based on data released earlier this year from Pew Research Center, the Microsoft company could be hitting the mark.

The Partner Program aims to help marketers identify the best target groups from the site's 645 million members. Amobee, Annalect, Hootsuite, Ogilvy, and Sprinklr now have signed on as partners.

Each will be integrated with the LinkedIn Audience Engagement API to enable customers and clients to discover new audiences. It also should help them better understand the types of content those audiences engage with and see how the content performs against industry benchmarks, LinkedIn Senior Product Manager Amita Paul explains in a blog post.

LinkedIn, which has been testing the feature for the past few months, believes the new category is the next step in terms of integrating better targeting options. The goal is to refine content strategies to make smarter marketing decisions that return better results on investments.

LinkedIn also made it easier for marketers to discover trending topics and content that key audiences like to engage with. These insights can help inform content marketing strategies and assist content leads in knowing what to post and whom to target.

Twenty-seven percent of adults -- about 29% men and 24% women -- in the United States use LinkedIn, according to data from Pew Research Center.

The Pew study is based on telephone interviews conducted from January 8 through February 7, 2019. The sample is drawn from 1,502 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The findings show that nearly half of college graduates and those who live in high-income households tend to use LinkedIn, compared with 10% or fewer of those who have not attended or at least have some college.

Nearly half make a salary of $75,000 annually, 51% have at least a college education, and 33% live in urban areas. Some 30% live in the suburbs and 10% live in rural areas, according to the Pew Research.

Overall, the majority who use LinkedIn -- 44% -- are between the ages of 25 and 29. Some 17% are between the ages of 18 and 24, while 37% are between the ages of 30 and 49, 27% are between the ages of 50 and 6,; and 11% are 65 and older.