Depending on what your business does you can get good mileage out of being active in the groups on LinkedIn. Like many things however, you get out of it what you put in. If you put the effort into adding quality comments to discussions people will see that you are knowledgeable and place more trust in you. Given this it is really best suited for people that are involved in b2b rather than b2c

All my office colleague use LinkedIn so i made a account there. It has lots of company and professional person profile.

Linkedin is a great way of networking with your professional contacts and potentially building business. The problem is that if you want to get the best value out of it you have to invest a lot of time. If you can't commit the time to it you will get very little back.

Now a days so many people are attracting to the LinkedIn which is social networking website. The LinkedIn is very good to interact with a professional guy. It is a source to interact with professional guys and non-professional persons.

I'm on there as well. I think the idea is to build a business network, so that perhaps when one of your connection's connections is looking for a financial planner (or whatever), they see that you're connected to one of their connections, and there's already a level of trust between you - albeit a very small one to start with - but at least it's something.

That's how I see it anyway, I'm sure others have different opinions.

It seems quite impersonal?

LinkedIn is a professional network

LinkedIn
 

Not sure how linkedin works, but I am on there.

What are the benefits of linkedin, if anyone can shed light on it for me.

personally, I view FB as personal and LinkedIn as professional...

it is very good.my many friends are using it.but i never used it.

I see it as the business equivalent of Facebook and it's probably the only site that fits into the realm of social media that I'm allowed to access at work. Not sure why they bother locking things like Facebook etc. down. I can't even read an article published on The Age about Facebook if it has the term 'Facebook' in the URL. Tell me that wasn't problematic when I was trying to research and build a case for the value of social media in a HR context!

Sorry for the ramble... now to get back on topic.

I see LinkedIn as a way to connect with professionals I work with or have worked with that I wouldn't necessarily become friends with on Facebook. Facebook is waaay too personal whereas I treat LinkedIn like a business tool and consider it safe for work. However, I am struggling at the moment with the launch of Silk Interiors. I want to heavily promote it, but I don't want directors of the company I work full-time thinking I've now become the 'Marketing & Communications Manager' of silk interiors and have moved on! Delimma.

I keep rambling off topic. Sorry guys. One of the things I really like about LinkedIn is the Q&A discussions. THere's always some good discussion going on. It's a bit like a forum for me, I guess. A gigantic forum with specialist areas. Some great discussion going on, especially in the Web 2.0 group.

There a lot of good plug ins. For example, I like that I can track what anyone has said on Twitter about our company or tap into SlideShare.

One of the down sides though is that it's pretty open to spam attacks and so many of the discussion groups are filled with irrelevant job ads and people trying to boost the links to their website but post utter fluff. LinkedIn need to do something about that.

Overall I think it's mostly a recruitment tool and as a user you have the opportunity to showcase your resume online. On the side, the site is supported by all of it's interactive social mediums. I love that you can look at a job ad and see that you're connected to the person hiring by two or three people and you can see who in your network can hook you up with that person.

Having said all that, I haven't used it for recruitment purposes myself.

LinkedIn is 1 of the best professional platform to connect peoples interested in your business and your services provided by you.

Personally, I haven't really gotten into linked in.

I have tried to put some effort in here and there, but I do think it's mainly for keeping in contact with past connections as opposed to making new ones.

I have no problem using facebook / twitter for that.