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January 16, 2008

LinkedIn – It’s About Who You Know

Regardless of your profession, we all at times find ourselves in a situation where it would be helpful to have an “in” with a particular individual or company. LinkedIn fills this need quite nicely with a huge network of more than 17 million people willing (at some level) to open doors using their own personal and business connections, share their expertise, and expand their social network.

(Scroll down for screenshots)

Practical Uses:

  • Create your own LinkedIn profile to market yourself online (LinkedIn profiles invariably end up being ranked highly in Google and Yahoo search results)
  • Gather background intelligence before ever meeting your prospective clients
  • Land a great job using your own network of contacts and connections
  • Circumvent the phone tree from hell and find someone inside the company that sold you your broken laptop for the third time

Insider Tips:

  • If you’re interested in receiving job offers and business opportunities be sure to review and adjust your Contact Settings accordingly and I would recommend including your email address somewhere in your profile
  • Avoid simply uploading your resume and address book.  Spend some time writing your profile to be read by a wide audience and solicit requests for Recommendations from trusted friends/co-workers using LinkedIn
  • Make yourself available to help others.  Offer to write Recommendations, match up colleagues with job opportunities, and respond to questions on LinkedIn Answers.

What We Liked:

  • Extremely large base of users means you have a better chance of finding the right people to meet your needs
  • Offers a series of powerful features such as LinkedIn Answers, Job Postings, Colleague and Classmate Search
  • LinkedIn profiles (similar to resumes) tend to index very well within Google and Yahoo search results meaning better online visibility

What We Didn’t Like:

  • Like many social networking sites, your privacy becomes diminished as you share more information about yourself
  • In most cases, contacting people outside of your personal network requires subscribing to one of LinkedIn’s paid plans which tend to be rather costly as compared to other online services
  • To realize maximum results, a decent amount of your time is needed to maintain your LinkedIn profile, create and maintain your network, and answer requests from other users

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched in: 2003
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
  • Founder: Reid Hoffman
  • Web site: http://www.linkedin.com

Costs:

  • Free for most users
  • Premium plans start at $19.95/month

Rating:

  • 4 out of 5 (strongly recommended)

LinkedIn Login Page

LinkedIn Dashboard

LinkedIn Jobs

LinkedIn Connections

LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Answers

Comments

  1. thank you so much

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