LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of January 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 200 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.
The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch,Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Korean, Indonesian, and Malay. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace. LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol "LNKD".
Join Linkedin now
LinkedIn is a professional networking site so if you see Facebook as being about your social life, LinkedIn is the equivalent for work.
As well as being a handy place for career development and networking, LinkedIn is a thriving community of entrepreneurs and business folk.
You sign up at Linkedin.com and fill out your profile with as much information as you can - jobs you have had in the past, details of your qualifications, skills, interests and knowledge, links to your website, blog and other online profiles.
Connecting
You can search LinkedIn for people to connect with by name or organization or you can let LinkedIn scan your email. LinkedIn differs from other online networks in that it is a bit stricter about how you connect with people - you need to state how you know the person you are connecting to.
This could be that you worked together on a project, or contracted that person's company to do some work. There is still a default option. "Friend", which most people end up using because it's easiest. When you request a LinedIn also allows you to add updates about what you are doing - effectively a bit like Twitter. It's pretty easy to set things up so that your tweets get posted to LinkedIn as well, which makes life a bit simpler and reduces the need to duplicate content.
Groups
One of the most useful elements of LinkedIn are the groups. There are groups based on subjects and issues, or on a geographical especially if you would like to find out what business people locally think about an issue. Just request to join the group and post your question.
Next Steps
You can also add Apps to your LinkedIn profile, helping you bring content in from other sites you maintain. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, you can automatically bring your posts into LinkedIn through the WordPress application. Similar Apps exist for other blogging platforms.
If you are super super keen on LinkedIn, you might want to pay for their premium membership option. This gives you access to lots of statistics about you has been looking a t your profile and therefore is handy for working out whether you need to take out that injunction or not.
Good network, but Spam me too much by email. LinkedIn keep sending too many emails.......
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