In July of this year, Jessi Hempel wrote a piece for Fortune Magazine, “LinkedIn: How It’s Changing Business,” extolling the virtues of LinkedIn. Tauted on the cover as, “Everything you need to know about LinkedIn,” the piece should be not be ignored; more important, the social media venue should not be ignored. With 225 million members (and the number will be higher tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and so on and so on and so on), in one year, LinkedIn has become, “one of the most powerful business tools on the planet,” writes Hempel. Worldwide, the number of people who log on at least once a month has soared to 141 million; that’s a 37% jump from last year and, according to the stats from ComScore, the number excludes those who log on from mobile devices. Hempel writes: “As it reaches critical mass, LinkedIn is becoming the dominant global forum for businesses of all kinds.” Users spend 20 minutes on the site, on average; that number is up 17% since last year. Compare that to how long a person spends, for example, on the Wall Street Journal website, a mere 10 minutes. It’s the world’s larget professional network but “that’s only part of it,” says CEO Jeff Weiner who asks the professional to, “Imagine a platform that can digitally represent every opportunity in the world.”
Here, in a blog-based nutshell, is what you need to know about LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a networking “event” in which a business or individual can…
1) Brag at once to thousands about his/her job history and education.
2) Showcase professional portfolios including publications, videos and power point presentations.
3) Reach target markets. For example, “Citigroup has used LinkedIn as a platform to power Connect, its marketing effort to reach women.”
4) Search for jobs
- The fastest growing group on LinkedIn is students. Weiner wants LinkedIn to “connect everyone everywhere who has or wants a job in order to ‘match talent with opportunity’,” writes Hempel.
- Hempel suggests that an updated LinkedIn profile could be more powerful than a resume for those searching for jobs in 2013.
5) Write public recommendations/testimonials and endorse others for a “job well done.”
6) Keep up with the latest news through LinkedIn Today.
7) Build “SEO for [his/her] professional life.”
Says CEO Jeff Weiner who believes that the company’s most critical asset is the information that’s voluntarily uploaded, “without our members, we don’t have LinkedIn – as a platform or an ecosystem.” While Weiner sees LinkedIn as a “consumer facing company,” the social media venue’s stock has risen 81%, to $170, since its May 2011 initial public offering.
Extolled above are just the virtues of LinkedIn. Never forget the power of all of today’s (and tomorrow’s) social media venues. Define what matters to you, figure out where your target market is hanging out, and join in. From Twitter to Reddit to Pinterest. Think about the power of each social media venue. For example, while Weiner calls LinkedIn an “economic graph” he sees Facebook as a “social graph that maps all human relationships.” There is a place for everyone and everything has its place in social media. Figure out yours’.
