Jan16

LinkedIn - It’s About Who You Know

LinkedIn Glamor Shot

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)

What you can use it for:

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Costs: