LinkedIn

An article by paradise    Comments Off on LinkedIn

LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) is a business-related social networking site. To give you an idea of how many people will see you on LinkedIn:

• roughly one million new members join LinkedIn every week, at a rate equivalent to a professional joining the site faster than one member per second.
• LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
• 100m+ professionals around the world as of March 2011
• 25m+ members in Europe
• 6m+ members in the UK
• 2m+ members in France
• 2m+ members in the Netherlands
• 1m+ members in Italy
• 1m+ members in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• 1m+ members in Spain
• 10m+ members in India
• 3m+ members in Canada
• 3m+ members in Brazil
• 2m+ members in Australia
• As of April 2011, LinkedIn counts more than 11 million recent college  graduates* around the world as members (*LinkedIn defines recent  graduates as members who have graduated within the last five  years–between 2005 and 2010).

This means that if you want to get seen, and you want to network, there is a lot more than Facebook. I really see LinkedIn as the “I graduated from Facebook” network (even though we all still like to hang out at our old college grounds on Facebook).

It is really odd that people have such mixed views of such a great service. Most people see it as a fantastic way to reach out to those in the business world, but some believe that it is becoming a world of spam from your high school friends who want you to give them a job. I think that it is just like email, to be successful you have to have an account, and you have to deal with the spam. If you adjust your privacy settings correctly you can get connected without having too much junk thrown your way.

Over the week I will be updating you all on how to use this in the everyday world, and how to use it for your small business. Watch for updates all week!