LinkedIn - Facebook for Suits!

LinkedIn has become the “Facebook for suits!” (Quote copyrighted by Napoleon Biggs). For the more B2B or shy-of-consumers type client, LinkedIn presents an interesting way to dip your toe into social media. A quick summary of some core functions:

1) Search: you can pick to search by ‘people, jobs, companies, answers, inbox and groups”. As you type, it suggests results just like Google Suggest.

2) Answers: allows questions in multiple languages (I tried “中国">” and got this result. Brands can sponsor categories, like Philips is sponsoring “Health”.

3)Groups: have now evolved into more lively forums, where you can ‘Like’ ‘Comment’, Flag’ or ‘Share’ via Twitter. As the group owner, you get to set the rules of engagement, accept or reject members, post promotions, move topics to the top (“Manager’s Choice”) and link your news feeds to blogs, twitter or other RSS feeds. Come see register for Web Wednesday's Group on LinkedIn to see it in action.

4) Companies (beta): is very much like Facebook Pages in that you can chose to “Follow” a company. The default setting seems to be ‘Overview’ and ‘Careers’ but Philips has a whole section on ‘Products & Services’ that you can recommend, join, comment and share (via Twitter). And then you get fascinating statistics, pulled off LinkedIn’s database that provide various demographic breakdowns of the people in your company, what job tier they are, how long they’ve worked for you, who’s been promoted (new titles) and who’s left (departures) - you can even see which new company they joined! It also shows the company growth as reflected in staff numbers on the LinkedIn database! Check out the Philips Statistics

5) Direct Ads: again similar to Facebook Ads in that you can target by gender and age geography, job function and seniority, industry and company size. You only pay per click and can set a daily budget. Read all about it here.

Best of all, LinkedIn has a Page on Facebook and Facebook has a Companies page on LinkedIn.