Why LinkedIN? My Top Ten Reasons

Myspace, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Youtube, LinkedIN – I am an active member of all these sites, but I spend most of my “available” Web 2.0 time on LinkedIn. Here are my top ten reasons with some introspection on why I give LinkedIN this honor:

1. Jobs & Hiring: Recruiters have realized that in the current market with a shortage of talent, you are not going find the best talent by advertising on job boards. Why? Because the best professionals are well taken care at thier current places of work and not at the point of wanting to jump companies.  Also, individuals seeking new jobs have realized that if their resume stacks up against a pile of hundred applicants, the most likely scenerio is that the recruiter may not even read his/her resume. The odds of getting noticed are far more when you come in with a recommendation from someone the recruiter knows and trusts – like a professional they have already placed. When I hire individuals, if the person does not have a profile or have not heard of this networking site, my hiring decision is made!

2. Profile Lookup: When you have worked in many continents and met many people, as I have it is very likely that you may not remember a name – a face is harder to forget, but a common name can be forgotten (at least, in my case). Nowadays, you can lookup a person's profile on LinkedIN pictures and when you get an email if you have the toolbar installed for MS Outlook, you have access to the full profile, actively remembering exactly how you know the person. You can also add this toolbar to Salesforce as an application as well.

3. Build New Relationships: When it comes to nurturing past relationships or building new ones, nothing is more powerful than reading a person's profile and seeing what you have in common to build rapport. If you have a goal of increasing your circle of influence, the first step is to expand your network and this is easy when you can search for a professional's profile and see what you have in common to build rapport.

4. Service recommendations: In LinkedIN’s service recommendations, you can read feedback of other service providers and find people who offer services that come recommended by your closest network.

5. LinkedIN Groups: This allows you to find like-minded people from across the spectrum that share your goals and interests. I am a member of many groups and just this last week I created a group for online business professionals who aspire to share the online presence of their business. The response was amazing, with over 500 members joining in less than a day . If you are interested, and have a LinkedIN profile you can join this group of online business owners here.

6. Answers: I think this is absolutely one of the best features of LinkedIN. Ask a question and you get some of the best answers from professionals in your network . The benefits to those who take the time to answer properly is immense, as you are rewarded with a star “Best Answer” that you can carry around. Besides the star, if your profile has your website mentioned, you are bound to get very relevant traffic to your website. Here is a prior video on this subject:

7. Search refined: Should you network with people you don’t know or only with people you know? This is a question that is asked periodically and you can find the answer to this in a story written on Marc Freedman's attempt to save Axel, an Argentine dog.  where he has to find a way get medicine to Argentina to save a dog. When you run into obstacles, you rely on your network for help. The larger your network, the easier to find someone in your network of 10 Million, who is flying to Buenos Aires from your home airport in the coming week. Read this story for more details.

8. Strengthen old relationships: It is easy to forget people you have met once or twice, or more often for whatever reason. When such a person in your network moves jobs or gets a promotion, LinkedIN sends you a non intrusive update. You can take advantage of this moment, to strengthen old relationships and drop them a note to say "Hi". It’s a great way to strengthen the relationships you already have without a lot of effort.

9. Things yet to come: If you like Facebook application, this is just around the corner at LinkedIN as it is currently in beta. I would love to see LinkedIN’s network group from current 16Million grow to upwards of 60Million, like Facebook. Many attribute this growth to Facebook applications. The alerting and ping mechanism in Facebook, however, may be too intrusive for the business professional. This is something we will need to wait and see what LinkedIN application does to LinkedIN growth.

10. Quality of traffic / conversion: And finally, my number one reason for spending time on Linkedin – quality of traffic to B2B sites. To really see this, you need to have goal tracking in place with your analytics software like Google Analytics. If you measure conversions and user time spent on your site, you can see that very few sites direct this quality traffic quality, not even Google. Why? All traffic sources aren’t equal. One reason for this high quality is because people read your profile/answers and the ones who come to your site are pre-sold on you and interested in engaging your services. This is one where it is not the volume of traffic that matters but rather the quality of traffic. Facebook, Myspace don’t stack up to LinkedIN, and that’s not just for this site.

Are you ready to get your LinkedIN network started? Here are some excellent resources to build your network:

• List of all highly networked professionals on LinkedIN
• Join our Online Business Owners Group as featured on MyLinkGroups.com.
• LinkedIn Contact Manager
• Another LION group
• More to come….

See you online in the LinkedIN network!