A useful metaphor I’ve come across is that Facebook is like your living room, Twitter is like the pub and LinkedIn is like your office.
As with all metaphors, it’s imperfect but it helps explain the difference between three of the major social media systems out there.
Like Facebook, using LinkedIn begins with creating a profile. The focus is your work life – jobs you’ve done, companies you’ve worked for, qualifications you’ve achieved. It’s about as exciting as writing your CV, a task which brings a different level of pleasure to each of us.
Also like Facebook, you can make links to friends on LinkedIn. Only, because this is a business environment, they’re called connections. As with Facebook, most of those you connect to aren’t friends at all, but acquaintances or even more distant contacts you’ve encountered during your career.
I joined LinkedIn years ago, when I was a manager in a global software company. Every few months I logged in, changed a few details and that was it. Colleagues did the same. We connected to one another but admitted that we weren’t sure what the point was.
The last two or three years have brought a change in the way that LinkedIn is used, at least from my perspective. It’s gone from being effectively an online CV database to a thriving social media hub. Discussion groups are busy, question and answer features have been added, and I’m receiving an increasing amount of contact via the site.
Having created your LinkedIn profile, you can choose to join groups of people with common interests, ask for advice through the new LinkedIn Answers feature, or help out by answering questions.
You can also add recommendations for colleagues and contacts and hope (or ask) that they leave recommendations for you. More and more recruiters are using LinkedIn as a way of searching for potential candidates, so if you’re hoping to get noticed, your profile needs to be as up to date and distinctive as possible.
While LinkedIn is a free service, you can also pay to use additional features, such as to see exactly who has been looking at your profile, get enhanced search facilities or contact people outside of your connections group.