LinkedIn is a social media site catering directly to professionals. It works on the concept of an individual connecting, or linking, with other professionals that they know and would recommend. Each person sets up a profile, which lists their work history, their education, their recommendations (both given and received), and other information such as groups, associations, and websites. Once they connect to another professional, their connections are added to the pool, one step removed. Eventually a person can amass a large pool of connections 2 or 3 people removed from them.

As you add friends, your pool grows…

How is this useful? Let’s say person A has a web design project, but doesn’t know anyone to do it. they could do a LinkedIn search for “Web Designers”, and a list of all matches in their network would be returned, along with the distance removed, and the contact(s) that connect them. All they would then have to do would be to contact the intermediate contact, and request an introduction. Note, the person listed here is a 3rd contact, so I’d need to get an introduction from one of my contacts to whichever of their contacts knows this person. This person had 13 recommendations, and over 500 first degree connections (500+ is the max number currently displayed).

Do people always stick to the desired intent of LinkedIn, by only linking to people that they know and recommend? No, that doesn’t always happen. There are people out there that have an ‘open relationship’ with LinkedIn, and accept invites from anyone and everyone. Even so, the chances are that a nice proportion of the people in your network are at least in your industry. LinkedIn also lets you know when your immediate contacts add new contacts, so you can watch as your friends networks grow, and see who they are adding (which is useful, given that they are now, by extension, in your network).

LinkedIn provides a profile page for each person, that reads like a resume, and is indexable by the engines, with links to up to 3 of your sites. What this profile page also does, is allow you to see former co-workers / fellow students, which gives you the capability you to automatically send them a link invite email. What about people that aren’t in your network? As long as you know their email address, you can invite them.

As LinkedIn has grown, it has added more and more features in order to make the site stickier. One of the more interesting features is LinkedIn Answers, where a person can ask a question, and anyone in their network will see it, and have the opportunity to respond. In the example above, that would give me over 870,000 people that would be able to see my question and respond…

Another useful feature is the built-in job board. Again, only those in your network see the posting, but given that it’s a professional site, where you are supposed to only link to people that you trust and would recommend, it’s a great way of finding pre-qualified candidates for a position.

[tags]Social Media, Linked In, LinkedIn[/tags]

Filed under: Social Marketing on Monday, August 6th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine | 1 Comment
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