Are You LinkedIn?
Saturday, September 12th, 2009 Blog by Orange County Design
You’ve heard of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, but have you taken the leap into that last one? LinkedIn, with its somewhat cumbersome interface and endless profile editing, can throw people off pretty quickly. However, it’s likely one of the more valuable social networking activities you can do as a small business owner or independent contractor. Let me go through a few of the basic reasons why I believe in LinkedIn.
1. Credibility: LinkedIn lets you build a resume of your work that is not only pretty thorough, but interactive. When people want to know more about your work history, they can click through links to companies and coworkers and get a whole picture of just how much great experience you’ve got.
2. Context: You are the company you keep… and the things they say about you. LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to show how immersed you are in your particular industry by building visual connections with co-workers, associates and friends. Plus, these same connections can laud you publicly through LinkedIn’s “Recommendations” feature, so you can build instant references without handing out your friends’ phone numbers all over town.
3. Networking: LinkedIn is online — in case you hadn’t noticed — and chock full of keyword and tagging opportunities. Not only is the site itself searchable, but Google indexes it rather fervently, so people who look for you will likely find your LinkedIn profile near the top of the page. Since you have the ability to customize your profile, you get to determine the industry, keywords, location, etc. to associate yourself with, essentially handcrafting the SEO of your professional image. Likewise, you can search for people by specific industries or skills within LinkedIn, which can be extremely helpful when you’re looking for service providers, industry connections or just local cohorts.
There are lots of other great features in LinkedIn, including groups, applications and updates. However, if you aren’t taking advantage of the three above, you may be missing out.
Image reworked from Photo by: Danksy on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/)