Aptus Consultants

The online world offers a huge variety of dedicated social networks that cater for many types of community such as holiday makers (WAYN), ethnic groups (NetNoir), scientists (SciSpace), photo sharers (Flickr) and even lovers (Flirtomatic). While each of these networks offer services and features which have specific appeal to its target community, they all share certain common attributes such as:

• Profile Creation – The facility for a user to create and maintain a discreet identity within the group.
• Contact & Communication – The facility for users to identify other members within the group and to communicate with them directly.
• Content Sharing – The facility for users to exchange information which is useful, interesting and \ or entertaining.

All social networks also feature a ‘hook’ which is the factor around which the community will form, be it support of a particular football team (e.g. Liverpool FC and anfield-online), love of a particular brand (e.g. Smart Car and DestinationSmart) or interest in a specific topic (e.g. HiFi and hifiwigwam).

LinkedIn is just like any other social network except that its ‘hook’ happens to be that it is a community for business professionals who are interested in networking. Just like other networks, LinkedIn offers:

1) Profile Creation: This allows you to create a comprehensive personal background including your career history, contact details and skill sets. People who know you can add personal recommendations about you, and you can even create a profile for your company to aid its promotion.

2) Contact & Communication: This is at the heart of LinkedIn, and lets you not only search for and link to existing business contacts, but also search for potential new contacts based on shared interests, location, industry or whether you have a contact in common. As with other social networks, you must first ask a potential new contact if they want to link to you, but once linked you can message them directly.

3) Content Sharing: LinkedIn allows you to join ‘Groups’ which are sub-communities that are designed to allow the exchange of ideas on specific topics (e.g. RDR, Intermediary Distribution, marketing technology etc). In the context of LinkedIn, content sharing primarily involves participation in the various discussions which go on within the individual groups. Such participation is essential in that it provides the opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge and hence ‘build’ your profile within the network. Monitoring of groups also allows you to see what other people think, thus helping you ensure your knowledge is current.

If you would like to know a little more about LinkedIn we have created a link to a short video, while clicking here will take you to the LinkedIn home page.