LinkedIn has announced a new partnership with IDG Communications to offer IT vendors and marketers new ways to engage wit LinkedIn members. The IDG Enterprise Custom Solutions group will provide services for marketing programs and offerings, building on existing LinkedIn capabilities.

“Based on a study LinkedIn conducted last year, LinkedIn has found that IT professionals are increasingly turning to social networks to do their work effectively, with 95% of IT decision makers saying they use LinkedIn in a business capacity,” a spokesperson for LinkedIn tells WebProNews. “The expertise and new offerings from IDG, such as the Hosted Technology Group Program and Custom Technology Group, will allow IT marketers to achieve more effectively connect with the IT professionals among LinkedIn’s members.”

The Hosted Technology Group Program refers to a series of “highly focused groups” LinkedIn and IDG are developing for business tech buyers. These will be on topics like virtualization, security, cloud, data center, networking, unified communications, business intelligence, mobility, and converged infrastructure.

“The one-year exclusive group sponsorship comes with LinkedIn Group platform, group recruitment, a dedicated IDG group manager, daily content and discussion posts, and discussion curation by IDG,” explains LinkedIn’s Michael Weir (pictured) in a blog post. “The sponsorship includes ad placements, client produced content assets and posts, and an expected number of group members.”

The Custom Technology Group refers to a six month program using the same group structure and sponsor ad placement components, which LinkedIn says “enhances the experience by allowing the sponsor to set the content and topic focus.” This includes articles created specifically for the group.

“Promotion and management are similar to the Hosted Technology Group,” writes Weir. “This program is dedicated to a client campaign and not tied to a single technology topic as is the case with Hosted Technology Groups.”

LinkedIn has 200 million members with which IT vendors and marketers will be able to potentially engage with through these programs.