By Russell Perkins I admit I am not seeing it on my LinkedIn home page yet (they are likely rolling this out in waves), but it’s still exciting to note a valuable new analytics tool from LinkedIn called “Who’s Viewed Your Updates.”Conceptually similar to the wildly popular “Who’s Viewed Your Profile,” LinkedIn will now allow you to easily assess the power of your LinkedIn posts. Within a rolling 14-day window, you’ll be able to how first, second and third level connections engage with your posts, as well as how many of them like and share your posts.

This will be a wonderful and easy way to answer the question that plagues many of us: is all our posting akin to pushing stuff off a cliff, or are people really interested in what I have to say? This has clear value from a professional networking perspective, but smart marketers will see that it also hold potential to test interest in new types of content, the strength of new market opportunities, and to take the pulse of an extended community to find what’s interesting to them and how best to present it.This is just one in a series of enhancements to the LinkedIn platform that continues to keep LinkedIn at the forefront of re-defining professional community, business networking and even publishing itself.