LinkedIn Goes All Out

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for a while, though I must profess, I haven’t seen huge benefits from it aside from impressing myself with the number of “connections” I’ve amassed (61 to date).

I first saw it as a way to align yourself with other well thought-of business people and do a little online networking. Then I got a message from a “connection” who asked me to “introduce” her to one of my connections who was connected to someone who lived in a city where she was job-searching (are you following me?). I thought that was a pretty smart use of the site; however, since I don’t plan on closing either of my companies anytime soon and looking for job, not really of use to me.

I’ve read that taking advantage of the recommendations tool where you can recommend someone and they can recommend you is one way to maximize its use. Haven’t gotten that far on it yet to do much of that. Though, the other day someone recommended me and I must say I was pretty thrilled.

But now LinkedIn has gotten smart and added some really useful tools. Like Facebook, they’ve now added a microblogging component where you can update what you are working on from minute to minute. That at least gives you reason to go there more than once a month to update what you’re doing and see what others are working on.

Again, like Facebook, you can now join groups with other professionals who share the same interest. Once again, more reason to go there and engage in dialogue. AND like Yahoo Answers, you can now go on and ask a question and answer questions, which is great to establish your expertise in a given subject area.

Things seem to be working for LinkedIn — recent statistics comparing social networking usage from 2007 to 2008 showed LinkedIn had the largest growth (271%) above both MySpace and Facebook, though it still has a way to go before its number of members matches those.

Check out my del.icio.us page for more articles on using LinkedIn for marketing.

And, uh, feel free to “recommend” me .