Social Media Networking Sites Charlotte Jenkins Designing the Social Web

2011’s Top Social Media Sites Facebook Twitter MySpace LinkedIn Friendster Hi5 Orkut NetLog Skype Badoo Meetup Digg Ning Youtube Blogger Flickr Delicious

LinkedIn LinkedIn is a business related networking site that allows you to control your professional identity online. It was launched in May 2003 and currently has approximately 120 million registered users. LinkedIn is used for career development and networking by connecting with business contacts. It is also a useful tool for entrepreneurs as you can display past job positions, qualifications, skills and knowledge, links to your website, blogs and other online profiles. Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.

How to connect with people You can search for people to connect with either by name or organisation. Or by letting LinkedIn scan your account to find people you are likely to know. LinkedIn is different from other networks as you need to state how you know the person, whether it be a friend, someone you worked with in the past, someone you currently work with or a company you contracted to do some work for you. When you send an invite to request a connection with someone you can personalise the invite to help them recognise you and to prevent it from looking like spam.

How your contact network is built YOU Direct connections Second Degree Connections (all the connections of each of your direct connections) Third Degree Connections (all the connections of each of your second degree connections)

LinkedIn Features Joining groups is one of the key features of LinkedIn, you can request to join a range of subjects and issues being raised geographically and more usefully locally to find out how local business people feel about a particular issue. LinkedIn allows you to provide updates about what you are doing – similar to tweets. You can add apps to your profile to link contents of your other sites you maintain such as twitter or blog sites. You can set it up that every time you post a blog or create a tweet it is posted onto your LinkedIn profile as well. This is useful in reducing the amount of duplicated information you post on all your online profiles. Users can follow different companies and receive notifications about the new joining and offers available.

This is a typical profile template displaying name, current job title and organisation, a small professional photo and current job location. A list of past experiences, education and the groups they have chosen to join. Shows their current connections and your type of connection with them.

Security LinkedIn has a much more strict connection policy in place than other popular social networking sites with the simple feature of having to state your relationship with the contact. Registered users can invite anyone to be a connection, whether registered or not, however if the recipient of your invite selects the option ‘I don’t know’ it counts as a strike against you. After 5 strikes you can no longer invite anyone else to connect with you without first supplying their address, preventing users from being able to spam other users with fake invitations. You cannot delete your profile from LinkedIn without contacting customer support and asking for a customer ticket requesting removal.

Suggests people you may know based on your other contacts and your profile information. Shows you how many times your profile has been viewed and how many times you were shown in a search result. Top business related headlines based on your interests.

How many contacts you are currently connected with. Job adverts based on your profile info and interests. Suggests groups you may like. News need of LinkedIn users updates, you can choose whether to see just your co workers updates or everyone's.