LinkedIn – Build your professional Contacts

Earlier i use to receive invitation mails from LinkedIn.com with my friends name. I thought it as a junk/spam mail and use to ignore it by moving to Deleted Items in my outlook. I thought that LinkedIn is a kind of social networking site which is used to kill our precious time. So i didn’t get much interest on visiting the website itself.

Later i was informed from one of my colleague about the actual use of LinkedIn site and LinkedIn profile. He said that LinkedIn is much useful in building your professional contacts and you can have connection with your colleagues, x colleagues and also groups associate with your domain. I was informed about this in the first week of Dec 2009. Now i am using LinkedIn for the past one and half months and I would like to share some information about LinkedIn which i found to be useful.

1. You can create and update a online profile for your profession. I hope with in couple of years online usage will be high comparing to now and you may need to have a online profile which exhibits your expertise in you profession.

2. You can keep in touch with your colleagues and also their job profile. You can track the professional information about your friends and colleagues (Ofcourse if they update their profile regularly)

3. With the available groups you can discuss your doubts with others who are working in your domain and also you can answers the posted questions. It would be helpful for us to update our theoretical knowledge.

4. You can recommend the work of your connections and also you might be recommended by your past colleagues who impressed with your performance. It will give added advantage to your profile.

5. LinkedIn online profile can be used as a background check for your previous companies.

There are lot more other integrated applications are available in LinkedIn which will be helpful to extend your professional network. Applications like Twitter client, Blogger client, Wordpress client, presentation, file upload etc are much useful.

I can’t say that i have fully explored the usages of LinkedIn. Still there are lot of pending usages. I am much interested to explore it.