What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn Review

What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn Review

LinkedIn: The Hub of Companies, Brands and Professionals

If there’s Facebook and Twitter for teens and young adults, DeviantArt for the art enthusiasts, Sound Cloud for the music lovers and WordPress for the bloggers, there’s also LinkedIn for the working professionals!

LinkedIn is a social networking website designed for use by people in professional occupations. Because it is geared for professional networking, it is quite stricter on rules around how users should present their names and profiles. It is built on the simple yet powerful premise, “businesses are built on relationships and success is built on networks”.

History

LinkedIn was first founded in December of 2002 but was launched only the year after, on May 2003. It was made available in 20 languages, including English, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Indonesian, Tagalog, Malay, Korean, Czech, Turkish, Romanian, Swedish, Spanish, Italian and French.

After its founding, huge investments from Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management LLC immediately flowed into LinkedIn, significantly increasing the valuation of the company. In October 2010, LinkedIn was already ranked by Silicon Valley Insider as #10 in their list of most valuable start ups. By December of the same year, the company was already valued $1.6 billion in the private markets.

LinkedIn Features

• Business Networking Connections

Connections allow users to invite anyone to become their connection or contact. However, if the invited party selects “Spam” or “I don’t know” in response, this will be counted against the inviter.

Inviters who get too many of these responses are susceptible to having their accounts closed or restricted. LinkedIn allows a maximum number of invites allowed albeit it is possible to request for this limit to be increased.

I currently have over 3,000 LinkedIn contacts!

• Gated-Access Approach

This is a feature that is intended to establish trust among site users. It specifically requires either an existing relationship or intervention of a common contact before one can connect or communicate with another user. This helps to reduce unwanted disturbances, spam and other pesky issues.

• LinkedIn Cites

Replacing LinkedIn Answers is LinkedIn Cites. It was introduced in early 2013 and is LinkedIn’s newer and more engaging feature for topic-sharing and user discussions.

• LinkedIn Polls

The LinkedIn Polls allows users to create polls of business-oriented topics. This is a feature introduced by the website in late 2011. In June of 2013 the feature was partially discontinued and is now only available from within the group areas.

Create a poll at your LinkedIn group

• LinkedIn Groups

The LinkedIn Groups allow users to form and/or join groups based on their interests. From within these groups users can discuss and engage upon any topic they desire. The groups have control features in that they can be open or restricted for joining up.

LinkedIn groups for social networking

• Sponsored Updates

Sponsored Updates is a feature designed to help users get their names and brands out there, perhaps to attract employers or employees. For a fixed fee, companies and individuals may have LinkedIn sponsor their contents and have these spread throughout the site’s user base.

This is very noteworthy due to the fact of the precise advertising controls that LinkedIn offers. You can literally select specific industries, companies and employee types who your ad will only be displayed to!

You can sponsor your updates for effective advertising

Why People Use LinkedIn

• To build a personal profile

Many LinkedIn users strive to be active in the LinkedIn community in hopes of getting recognized and becoming more familiar in the eyes of other users.

It’s a great approach to get more chances of meeting new people and building more contacts. It has also proven itself as a powerful tool when seeking employment opportunities since a well filled out LinkedIn profile is the equivalent of a top-notch resume!

LinkedIn professional profile

• To get skill endorsements and recommendations

At LinkedIn it is possible to have others endorse your claimed skills and this is a valuable tool to help demonstrate your expertise in different areas. Additionally, one can gain recommendations from other users and this is also very useful for many things.

Get skill endorsements

• To build a business profile

Many LinkedIn users choose to create a business profile for B2B and B2-consumer activities. With the LinkedIn business profile you can create detailed categories for all of your products and services.

You can also gain followers and recommendations as well. Additionally, your business profile has a “wall” feature that allows you to post updates which can also be advertised as well.

Build a LinkedIn business profile

• To research

LinkedIn is a good starting point for researching people. All it takes is typing their names, looking into their work history and you will immediately get an inkling of how long they have worked for their companies or what they have previously done.

• To recruit

Companies typically use LinkedIn for recruitment purposes. They sift through profiles of potential employee candidates and approach whoever that has the characteristics they are looking for.

Search for employees at LinkedIn

Site Statistics

As of July 2013, LinkedIn has been reported to have acquired 259 million users in more than 200 countries. It also has 65 million active monthly visitors in the U.S. alone and some 178 million from all over the world. In October later that year, this number increased to an astonishing 184 million.

Future Trend

With social networking continuously growing by the day and with it being the only mainstream hub for professionals and companies, LinkedIn is expected to reach farther heights in the market.

Although controversies have emerged through the years – Syrian users reporting that LinkedIn stopped accepting connections from IP addresses originating from Syria, the 2012 LinkedIn password hack and the selling of fictitious securities by ill users of the site – much better service and security from the site is expected in the near future.

Conclusion

Build yourself a good professional profile and increase your chances of landing a much better job position by signing up with LinkedIn. Or make easy the recruitment process of your company by simply sifting through filtered profiles of potential candidates with desirable characteristics.

If you are into business yourself, have your brand exposed to millions of users worldwide through LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates. It’s not at all difficult to join the community and the benefits you can reap are infinite.

If you have any comments or suggestions on this article you are invited to post them in the comments section below. If you would like to share with us about your Personal or Business profile at LinkedIn we would be happy to discuss that also.

You’re invited to visit my personal LinkedIn profile

You can also make your way over to our LinkedIn business page.

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