LinkedIn recently hit 70M users worldwide. While less than 40M are in the USA, LinkedIn’s American growth is staggering. I was using LinkedIn back in 2003 and I was like a voice crying in the wilderness. I would encourage people to start using the site for networking, job searches, business due diligence and other purposes. Quite often, people didn’t create a profile at the time, but they are now. Boy, are they now. The world is getting smaller. Whereas only a few years ago you would almost never heard of LinkedIn in the press, now you’re hearing about it every day if not multiple times a day. Most people have figured out that Social Media isn’t a pet rock, mood ring or hula hoop. This isn’t going away. Facebook and Twitter have been very social by nature and LinkedIn has always been about business. But I’m seeing changes on LinkedIn. I’m …
LinkedIn Is a Database Impersonating a Social Media Platform
LinkedIn is the world’s best online business networking platform with over 65,000,000 professionals using it and the average user being 41 years old and earning $109,000 per year. Not a bad demographic for doing business with. As the world is getting smaller, the number of professionals using LinkedIn is getting bigger. Unlike a number of other networking sites, this is not an electronic bathroom wall. Professionals who use LinkedIn most effectively realize that LinkedIn is a Social Media platform but in reality it’s really a database. It is a database in the most literal meaning of the word. You can strategically search through LinkedIn and identify people and organizations that you want to sell to, create alliances with, hire, refer business to, network with, and add value to as a professional. One of the most attractive features of LinkedIn is the merging of the users’ contacts. We’re all familiar with …