Is LinkedIn Worth It?

A colleague recently asked me "Is it worth it to get involved with LInkedIn?" and anyone who follows this blog or knows me would understand that it is quite dangerous to ask me my opinion. Especially about a business-to-business social media platform.

After a lengthy conversation and email, the question offered up a great opportunity to share some of the insights the B-to-B Blog has provided over the years about LinkedIn.

Here is an excerpt of the email response sent to that colleague just today. Hope this is useful to you, and happy Connecting!

• Getting Started:  This blog post shares some basic tips to get started on LinkedIn.
• What's All the Fuss About?  This post offers up some features of LinkedIn that are truly worth loving.
• A LinkedIn Reality Check:  The post suggest pointers folks can employ when assessing their use of LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn Labs: For those power LinkedIn users, this post offers a valuable insight into the cool world of LInkedIn Labs. 
• Keeping Pace with LinkedIn Features: Finally, the most recent post tries to make sense of new features the social media platform offers. 

Intrigued? Horrified?  Come visit me over at LinkedIn to see what all the fuss is about!

The Cool World of LinkedInLabs: 4 Tools You Don’t Want to Miss

LinkedIn is the foremost social media tool for business-to-business community members.

With over 2 million companies representing all industries, sizes and geographies active in LinkedIn,  it’s the b-to-b social media platform that delivers a powerful punch.

Previous BtoB Blog posts talk about getting started on LinkedIn  and taking a hard look at your existing LinkedIn presence. 

LinkedIn Labs

This post puts the spotlight on LinkedIn Labs, a set of projects and experimental features built by the employees of LinkedIn.  

LinkedIn Labs currently makes 16 applications available for free, accessed with only a simple LinkedIn log in.

LinkedIn shares the feature sets as demonstrations and to solicit feedback. Note applications featured in  "the Lab" may be added and removed over time based on popularity and support. Here are some current favorites: 

LinkedIn Maps

Use this tool to visualize your professional network, clustered in real-time based on inter-relationships. You’ll see how your existing connections interrelate with each other, and you can Tweet or share the map on social media of course!

Signal

Overwhelmed with all those status updates from your connections? Signal is aimed at making it easy to glean the most relevant insights from the never-ending stream of status updates and news.

Year in Review

This one is a must!  Named a Hackday Winner, this is a slick visual representation of everyone in your network who changed jobs in a given year. Didn't we see this as an email at the end of each year?

Resume Builder

I can’t believe I just found this one!  This application lets you turn your LinkedIn Profile into a beautiful resume in seconds. Avoid the hassles of building and updating multiple Word and PDF documents. Pick a resume template, customize content, and and share the result to your heart's content.