Why LinkedIn?

When asked by our clients which social networking tools should they use it always comes down to, in our opinion, the 3 core sites that every social media strategy should utilise and that is

• Twitter
• Facebook and
• LinkedIn

We have already spoken about the value of Facebook and Twitter so what about LinkedIn? what does that bring to the Social Media party?

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has always been positioned as the business networking sites to link with other professionals that you have met along the way based on education, employment history and professional interests, indeed it has over 60 million professionals listed and it is growing rapidly.

However its absolute unique feature is the ability to ‘see’ the contacts that you don’t know just now but really would like to know, and LinkedIn will tell you how many degrees of separation there are between you and them.You can use this knowledge to get introductions to people from your network you are already connected too and this is the ticket to building your network.

LinkedIn is also great for your own personal SEO – have you googled yourself lately? If you’ve got a linkedin profile it will be near the top…

So what can you use linked in for?

1. Stay in touch with professional colleagues you know, as they update their status you will be alerted
2. Find experts and challenge ideas, sometimes your own business circle won’t be able to help but if you search the ‘answers’ page or the search button with keywords you will find someone to help you
3. Explore opportunities, the obvious one here is job opportunities or recruiting, but you might like to research for joint venture partners too.
4. Find people, you may not be able to connect with them directly through LinkedIn (if they are too many degrees away) but you might find them on Twitter!
5. Join (or start) special interest groups and grow your network
6. Answer other peoples questions….become the expert

Other great features of LinkedIn

1. You can re-order your profile page so that you decide whats important for visitors to see first.
2. You can add Twitter to your profile, just remember in your Tweet to include #in to include that post, if its not relevant don’t put it in LinkedIn (you’ll need to go to your settings to make sure this happens)
3. You can also scan what people are saying on Twitter about your company by loading company buzz… quite useful for business reputation

Great Applications you can include:

1. You can include your blog as part of your profile
2. You can include presentations in your profile
3. You can include a reading list that you recommend
4. You can use ‘huddle’ a workspace application to collaborate and share documents
5. You can use a trip application to show when you’re travelling

All of these add to your overall profile (do make sure its 100% complete) why use LinkedIn?

Well we think you’d be foolish not to.