Featured by: Lisa Barone is Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., an Internet marketing company that specializes in providing clients with online reputation management, social media services, and other Internet services.

Because syncing with Twitter wasn’t enough, professional social network LinkedIn has taken further steps to increase the site’s social sharing aspect for SMBs and business professionals. As of yesterday, sharing news on LinkedIn got a whole lot easier with the adoption of a bunch of new site features. Here’s a look at the best of what’s new.

Better Controls

One of the most useful parts of Facebook has always been the ability to control which members of your network have access to which information. For example, you could set your filters so that your family and professional contacts were seeing different items and updates. LinkedIn has finally adopted this feature, giving users’ complete control over who sees which updates – whether it’s everyone, specific connections, a group you belong to or a specific user. Depending on how you use your LinkedIn statuses, this can be a really powerful way to target individual pieces of content toward the right audience. It gets rid of that firehouse effect that we often get trying to share information in social networking and ciphers directly into the group you’re most interested in reaching. This is a nice add from LinkedIn.

Better Sharing Ability

Much of yesterday’s announcement focused the new sharing options available to help promote content on the site. If you’re a regular Facebook user, many of the new additions will seem pretty intuitive. Mostly, because you’ve used them all before. Some of the new adds include:

Images and Article excerpt: Complete control over the image and excerpt (like!) used when sharing news articles or bog posts.
See and delete your own posts: Ability to preview, edit, and delete a status message. [Typos are credibility killers.]
Enhanced re-share options: One-click reshare button to make it easier for others to pass on your content (and for you to pass on other people’s content). There’s also a new attribution feature that will give credit to the original sharer of the article, which I like. Anything that you publicly share will appear on your profile to keep it fresh, show people what you’re about, and to highlight personal expertise.
LinkedIn says they’ll also be making it easier to share content off-site and once again encourage the use of LinkedIn’s own URL shortener, lnkd.in.

While the changes announced aren’t drastic, I think they’ll do a nice job increasing the social feel of LinkedIn. I think many SMB owners shy away from LinkedIn because they see it as the stuffier of the social networks, but these new features will help to change that. By making it easier to share content and making that content (and its sources) more prominent, it helps keep constant life on the site and creates more incentive for participation. The more life, the more people will keep coming back – to check out the profiles, to participate in the discussion groups and to be part of the community as a whole.

We’ve previously mentioned some fun ways to get more out of LinkedIn, and I’d really encourage SMB owners to set up shop on the site, if they haven’t already. Not only are there great networking opportunities, but the new features announced yesterday really make it an even better place to share and promote content.