How to make the most of LinkedIn

There’s been a flurry of news over the last couple of weeks about LinkedIn upgrading its ‘Company Pages’ functionality to help businesses better showcase products and services with more multimedia content and greater levels of interactivity.

The idea is to encourage employees, customers and others to spread word-of-mouth about a company throughout the LinkedIn network to boost sales and interaction level.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn added the ability for members to ‘Follow’ companies on the site as they might follow other users on Twitter or "Like" a brand on Facebook. Some 30 million LinkedIn users are now following over 1 million companies to find out about new job openings or new hires or promotions and other company developments.

To date, LinkedIn seems to have been a forum geared towards job searching. The addition of the ‘Follow’ functionality, plus ‘Groups’, ‘Questions and Answers’ and ‘Twitter’ updates has marked a huge leap forward for the platform to enable people to use it to get professional development tips and use an extended network of their peers as a sounding boarding for initiatives they are planning at work.

I myself have joined a range of alumini groups run by my former universities and places of work as well as a professional networking groups for inhouse PR people, amongst other things. The former has generated a wealth of irrelevant emails. Thankfully with hotmail’s new ‘social updates’ tab I can get rid of these in one clean sweep in my inbox.

However, the very niche ‘specialist groups’ have come into their own. They have created opportunities for me to network with like-minded individuals in similar roles at other companies at live events. 

I find that if you meet someone ‘in the flesh’, even if it's just the once, your ‘working’ or ‘networking’ relationship is far more effective. I now have a forum where I can post questions about tools or suppliers I’m considering using as a PR professional. 

One of my group takes a conscious decision to vet who joins so when we do meet up we can discuss professional issues and opportunities openly without having suppliers with a vested interest pitch a product or service at us. For me this really is invaluable.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s recruited or found a job via LinkedIn, but apparently it does happen according to the Wall Street Journal. The top tip from Silicon.com is to create a target list of companies you want to work for and 'Follow' them. You'll then be able to see if they post up details of any vacancies. 


I can certainly see that social media in a B2B world is going to become more important as these platforms develop and mature.