Linkedin like all social media networks has been competing to roll out new changes to attract more users, and provide extra widgets to there users to help them increase their network and client base! Lately LinkedIn has become heavily involved in this race by launching new integrations like the:
- Twitter integration: Lets you take advantage of all the significant traffic you already have on twitter
- Microsoft Outlook: Offers you a better way to connect with your current LI contact and also help grow your network.
Back in December LinkedIn rolled out new look to the members’ homepage, added the capability of adding tags to the contacts, launched the LinkedIn iPhone application, and few weeks ago launched the Blackberries LinkedIn application:
http://www.blog.linkedin.com/2010/03/29/linkedin-blackberry/
And only yesterday, LinkedIn rolled out the following major link-sharing features that will revolutionize the way members use LinkedIn:
1- Image and article excerpt as seen on Facebook sharing feature, that will help with increasing traffic through clickthroughs
2- You are in control of your posts where you can edit, change or delete them for status updates as many complained about the inability to spell check their updates before posting them
3- You have total control on who can see or can’t see what you are sharing which was another major concern for members before, where you either hide all updates to everyone or showed them to everyone
4- Re-share the links/ blogs/ posts/ updates similar to the Re-tweet on twitter which will help your posts go viral at the click of a button, creating new traffic and building links. You can also give credit to the person that shared any article with you by attributing it to them
5- Shared items will further optimize the profiles by increasing SEO as it will create fresh content for the search engines, especially with the re-sharing feature that also improves the off-site sharing experience
6- A link shortening application within LinkedIn: Inkd.in to help with its Twitter interaction, still to see if traffic can be tracked on that application and sources of traffic can be detected like on bit.ly
Additionally, LinkedIn is also repositioning itself as a leader in the professional social networking world by offering another hub for sharing articles, news and informations with whoever you choose from your business contacts and it is well deserved.
Furthermore, LinkedIn is expected to add new features that will bring more clarity to the new members on how to import their contacts instead of sending an invite to all their address book contacts by default. This feature will also clarify how to avoid creating duplicate profiles which both remain the biggest challenges facing new members.
I am an avid user of LinkedIn, I use it daily and I am very excited about the new improvements added and looking for more exciting news to share with you.
Cheers,
Sahar Andrade
www.linkedin.com/in/saharandrade
www.facebook.com/saharconsulting
www.twitter.com/saharconsulting
I’m especially glad that LinkedIn is adding more functionality. One issue is that if you have a WordPress blog you may be duplicating posts to other social media sites if you use the LinkedIn feature. Ping.fm enables you to post to the social media sites of your choice as soon as you hit the “publish” button. Of course, it will be great to distribute other updates specific to your LinkedIn home page.
Thank you Jeanette and that is a great point to consider when publising posts and using LI features