LINKEDIN HAS BIG PLANS BUT WHAT ABOUT ITS SMALL PLANS?
Anyone still addicted to long-form journalism has to love The New Yorker. Nicholas Lemann’s recent provide of LinkedIn honcho Reid Hoffman is yet another feather in the great magazine’s cap.
I was disappointed that while we learned a lot about Hoffman’s background, his big picture vision of politics and philanthropy, we didn’t learn much about the smaller, meatier details about his plans for LinkedIn itself.
Among social platforms, LinkedIn has its niche with jobs and business. What better place for a job seeker to post your resume, look for contacts and scan company sites for jobs? There are great job boards out there (Indeed and Startwire are my faves) but even those boards always ask for LinkedIn info or give you the opportunity to fast track your application by linking to your profile on LinkedIn itself.
That’s the stuff you already know. What I was hoping to hear in the article is how Hoffman is thinking of tweaking the service to make it better. He wouldn’t have to give away secrets or surprises- he could just float some grand scheme. The article just mentions that he’d like people to dispense business advice and that does happen and sometimes, this biz wisdom is useful. But he could have touted other services there which are just as useful and are great selling points for the service.
- FORUMS- this is where you can go to specific industry chat areas and learn something about your field and join a discussion. You can also show off your expertise here. Some of my favorites are these (note: some of them are private groups that you have to ask to join):
* Entrepreneurs In Social Media
* Media Professionals Worldwide
LinkedIn even released a list of new features for Forums a few weeks ago. So, why not tout them?
- POSTS- you know about ‘status’ updates where you add a one-liner about your work or a good article, but did you know how to post a full article on LinkedIn? You can do it through post updates and it’s easy.
To access posts, go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the “Publish A Post” button near the top (next to ‘status’ and ‘photo’ updates). You’ll come to a page like this.
Notice that they give you all kinds of nice formatting options (bold, italics, links, centering), plus on the left side, they even give you some suggestions of recent events you can discuss (in this case, Twitter Moments, Zappos’ Holocracy). And then you just type up your thoughts there. They even provide some good tips about writing a good post. You can also get inspired by some of the top rated posts in their Pulse section, which will also give you good hints about how to write a strong post.
Even after those two great features, there’s also the online learning (Lynda.com), education (for students, aka Youniversity) and Slideshare (aka free, useful PowerPoint presentations) sections to explore on LinkedIn. Again, why not tout these things? Don’t wait for a great LinkedIn article to hear about these things- check them out now.