March 2011

Back in 2007, I wrote a review of LinkedIn, describing it as “cross between a people search site and a social networking site”, and noting its rapidly growing subscriber base of over 9 million subscribers around the world.

LinkedIn now has 100 million subscribers, over one million company pages, and is now much more than just a networking site.

What is LinkedIn doing well?

Networking

• At heart, LinkedIn is still a simple way for business and social connections to come together.
• LinkedIn groups offer a simple and cheap way to share ideas with people with similar professional and business interests.

Business development

• Profile raising – LinkedIn helps individuals, companies and groups to share a day to day message with a very large audience of people that they are connected to, or want to connect to.
• Sharing news – people and companies are taking advantage of incorporating their blog and twitter feeds into LinkedIn, to broaden their audience for recruiting staff, sharing their ideas and promoting their news and events.
• Finding people – recruiters, researchers and entrepreneurs thank LinkedIn every day for helping them to connect to people around the world who can help them in their business and social endeavours.

Research tool

• As a very simple check on individuals – who is working where, where have they worked, and who are they connected to?
• On companies – who works for a company, who has recently joined or left?
• As a Q&A tool – ask a question, and get answers from around the world, from people whose expertise you can quickly review.

Over the last five years, LinkedIn has developed into a very useful social media tool for people coming together for work, professional development or seeking advice.  Much less hyped than Facebook, it has none the less, changed the way that we connect.