Paul Eckert – Using LinkedIn for Business Networking
LinkedIn and Your Career Development
Paul Eckert – Using LinkedIn By Peggy Murrah and Chris Muccio
LinkedIn is more than just another social networking site in the Internet. It can actually help you in your career development. There are around 20 million professionals connected by LinkedIn. With millions of professionals out there that you can connect with, you can make your career grow with the help of LinkedIn and other professionals.
Your LinkedIn profile maybe considered as your online resume. As a professional, your educational background, your organizational and company affiliations and other important professional information may be shown in your LinkedIn profile. This way, other professionals and employers can easily learn who you are and what you have to offer.
You can also increase your visibility by adding keywords that are related to your profession and to what you do best as a professional. If employers and people who are looking for a resource person related to your field will search for those keywords, you get a better chance of being the first person on the list.
Connect and grow your network. From your email address book, you can easily add friends to your LinkedIn network. You can also search friends who were employed by the same company you are connected with right now. There should be at least 50 people in your first degree connection in order for you to maximize your use of LinkedIn. Anything less than this would just make you another one of those less effective users of LinkedIn.
Use LinkedIn Answers to the Max. Just like Yahoo Answers!, LinkedIn has LinkedIn Answers that allows people to post questions to the network. If you have any concern in your career development or in the way you do your work, you can just use this feature and solicit answer from all sorts of professionals in your network. You can also answer the questions posted by other people in the network so that people can notice what you know and what you have to offer.
LinkedIn is one of the best features of Web 2.0. It connects people and gives them a chance to get together for professional and work-related reasons. With its 20 million users worldwide, it would be great to connect and promote your own professional expertise.