LinkedIn Vs Others.

In these times of social networking where border does not matter anymore and your friend profile has friends from almost every part of the globe. An entire generation is brought up who live and breathe on social networking sites such as facebook and orkut. Needless to say there is a great business opportunity that can be met along the same lines as social networking sites. Imagine a community of professionals along the lines of social networking sites. LinkedIn, spoke, plaxo and others are some such networking sites where professionals meet so as to further the cause of their business.

LinkedIn spoke, plaxo are business oriented social networking sites and the underlying principle behind their operation is more or less same. Since the content is mainly business related, the professionals can avail of greater opportunities and enhance their network beyond the walls of their work space. In this your direct contacts are called connections or co workers. These groups of people are those who are known to you personally. Any other contacts like friend of your friend are called second degree connections and similarly there are third degree connections. This feature is more or less common to all this networking sites.

There are many advantages of these networking sites such as

1. You can enhance your professional network
2. You can get yourself introduced to a prospective employer by seeing his friend and see if you have common contact.
3. If you are planning to hire someone then you can check his credential by referring to one of his contacts.
4. This platform can also be used to hire or find a suitable job.

The advantages of linkedIn over spoke, plaxo and the likes are many but none as important as the fact that it has a much wide user base. This burgeoning user base gives much more contacts to be used effectively and is a favorite hunting ground for the employers. The other advantages are the many features that LinkedIn provides like LinkedIn Answers. Similar to Yahoo answers and Google Answers, you can post any professional query in the LinkedIn and the community at large can tackle or give a way out for you.

Then there is LinkedIn group. This is a searchable group where you can search for a particular group and join the group like say alumni of a particular college or school and helps you get in touch with many others. Others feature that are in offer are LinkedIn polls which however is still in its alpha.

The gated access approach also makes sure that there is some trust between the joining members and hence as a policy you should add only those who are known to you.

Though LinkedIn is still a long way to replace the traditional way of how people communicate in business but to say it is not the future is also foolhardy. In times to come it may become as important place for references as any that exist today.