5 Things to Love About LinkedIn

More than 160 million professionals can’t be wrong!

The globe's business professionals are joining LinkedIn at a rate of 2 members per second. Amazing when you figure that’s nearly 170,000 new LinkedIn members every 24 hours.

The BtoB Blog has looked at LinkedIn before, and our enthusiasm hasn’t waned a bit.

LinkedIn combines the best features of social media and business networking to develop personal and business connections with a range of colleagues.  It has also been amazing to see the new features regularly rolled out or accessed via LinkedIn Labs.  

From networking to job searching, from sharing best practices and thought leadership to keeping current with industry trends, there’s a lot to love with LinkedIn.  Here are five standouts:

1. Connect one on one. LinkedIn lets you virtually network with individuals related to your field.  Even when you’re not job-hunting, it pays to connect with a professional network. As an example, LinkedIn has let me maintain professional connections with folks I’ve met at marketing conferences a few years back.  As a solo practioner, I’ve also been able to share information and pose questions to individuals in my network – something of great value when you work on your own. This wouldn't have been possible pre-LinkedIn.
2. Connect with groups.  With  LinkedIn Groups you quickly discover the most popular discussions in your field.  LinkedIn Groups let you engage with influential people in your field. 
3. Connect with information. LinkedIn quickly delivers fast access to the latest articles in your field.  The introduction of LinkedIn Today a year or so back was by far one of the best features the service provides.   Have you noticed that every time you log in to LinkedIn, you see top articles shared by people in your network? You can see who shared the article and what they said about it. Your homepage is customized to your industry, network, and areas of interest. LinkedIn does the work for you, curating the most timely and informative articles your peers are reading.  Priceless!
4. Get email updates. Keep track of your group with cool weekly emails.  If you opt in, LinkedIn automatically sends out a summary of what your group is doing – new jobs, new titles, new posts etc. For those of us who live and die by the email inbox, this is a fast way to stay connected without even logging into LinkedIn.
5. See open jobs of interest.  This is a no brainer. LinkedIn job listings and the ability to save job searches or get job alerts (free!) are some of the more robust features of LinkedIn.  If you fully complete your profile, you will automatically see job listings that match your skill set.  Again, priceless!

While there is a lot to love with LinkedIn, this article does a good job of aggregating some annoying behaviors 

One of my pet peeve annoying behaviors:  WHEN LINKEDIN CONNECTIONS POST UPDATES USING ALL CAPS WHICH IS A LOT LIKE SCREAMING….

All in all, since I got so fed up with Facebook (read this insight here) and deactivated my account, LinkedIn is now the go-to social media community!