Facebook may be the largest social media platform in the world, but LinkedIn may be the most valuable. LinkedIn is considered to be the “professional” version of Facebook. Users create profiles, but these profiles have more of an emphasis on personal achievement and skill sets. LinkedIn provides a way for people to make personal business connections and apply for jobs. It is the world’s best way to network online. Professionals can make personal recommendations and apply for jobs using connections on the site. It allows users to share their personal expertise with the world. This can be a huge help to college students who are looking to find a job out of college.

A social media source that I recommend for any business is LinkedIn. My suggestion stems from when one is looking for a constructive social media site that is professional LinkedIn is the place to go. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which are seen as more juvenile, LinkedIn is a very driven platform with the sole purpose of connected professionals. Getting an individual or business account on the site instantly connects you will other professionals in your same industry, allowing for easy idea exchange, and post and fill job opportunities.  Since LinkedIn is formed around the connection of professionals, this is the perfect fit for a final social media connection for your business, regardless of your mission.

A social network for business professionals. Although this sounds like a good idea, I have yet to hear any LinkedIn success stories. For me the whole idea of making friends to get hired seemed a bit utilitarian. Also, the interface seemed a bit complicated and unnecessarily unattractive. Therefore, I never did more with LinkedIn than create a profile and send a few friend requests to people that I could have just called on the phone in the first place. I may be missing out on some great career opportunities by not actively using LinkedIn, but to me, those missed opportunities just aren’t worth the cost.

I spent this past summer developing LinkedIn profile pages for an industrial engineering company in Michigan named The Productivity Team. They were seeking a way to expand their social media presence. Realizing that their clients are large businesses and not individual American’s they stayed away from Facebook and twitter and instead pursued a presence on LinkedIn. The business minded structure of LinkedIn enables them to reach executives of large companies through a professional medium.  I built profiles for the President and Vice-President of The Productivity Team. These profiles were designed to stress their own experience and the quality of the company they owned. With these profiles they could connect with executives at other companies and attempt to acquire projects.

In addition I developed a LinkedIn company page that described The Productivity Team. This would be a second place on LinkedIn where I potential customer could discover valuable information about the company.

The third type of page that I developed was based around specific lean manufacturing training that The Productivity Team provides. They are one of the nations largest providers of MODAPTS training. I created a page specifically for MODAPTS training so that anyone on LinkedIn interested in that topic would find our  page and be directed towards our company as a top provider of that training. Within a month, The Productivity Team had obtained a training contract with one of the nations largest truck manufacturers.

Linkedin.com is a website for individuals wanting to do a variety of different things. You can search for businesses or search for individuals and you can interact with them too through different features of the website. You can also find what jobs are available in the area of your choice along with the job description, experience needed, and contact information. Linkedin is also a globally used website where any and all businesses can put their information on the site available for anyone to see.

They also made it available to search for “old classmates” or any and all possibilities for this category.

Another option is posting questions on the site where professionals have the ability to reply answers to them. This helps businesses have a relationship to their consumers or employers to their employees.

This site seems like an interesting site to work with in the professional field.

Culture, particularly in America, is increasingly dictated by online activity and interactions. I get so tired of hearing people talk about their Facebook wall activity or what Charlie Sheen just tweeted. While there is a lot of merit to social networking, it has spawned many problems. That’s another blog post though…what I want to discuss is LinkedIn. I personally enjoy LinkedIn and appreciate its vision and potential, but it’s hard for me to reconcile the arguable unprofessionalism of the familiar Myspace, Facebook and Twitter with the pushed professional “atmosphere” of LinkedIn. Can we really network professionally, get jobs and internships, meet business peers and even create leads based on one website? Traditionally, professional interaction is based on handshakes, golf outings and what kind of shoes you wear, not your Facebook profile.

I strongly believe that while this may cause many skeptical eyebrows to be raised today, it will make a lot of sense in the very near future. LinkedIn has been acclaimed for its success and I personally know people who have been hired based on initial contact through LinkedIn. Monster is great for job searching, but LinkedIn takes their model a step further by being great for people searching…which sounds a lot like networking! Looking toward the future is how great organizations are born. Founded in just 2002, the site has over 90 million members and was recently rated #24 in FastCompany.com’s list of the Fifty Most Innovative Companies, ahead of Amazon and right behind eBay. Wow.

Internet Entrepreneurship is all about finding the next big thing, and I strongly believe that LinkedIn is just that for the young and soon-to-be professionals of the world.