Linkedin

What Is LinkedIn and Why Should You Be on It?

Put simply, LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Whether you're a marketing executive at a major company, a business owner who runs a small local shop or even a first year college person looking to explore future career options, LinkedIn is for anybody and everybody who's interested in taking their professional lives seriously by finding new opportunities to grow their careers and to connect with other professionals.

It's sort of like a traditional networking event where you go and meet other professionals in person, talk a little bit about what you do and exchange business cards. On LinkedIn, however, you add "connections" similarly to how you'd make a friend request on Face book, you converse via private message (or available contact information) and you have all of your professional experience and achievements laid out in a neatly organized profile to show off to other users.

LinkedIn is very similar to Facebook in terms of its broad feature offering. These features are more specialized because they cater to professionals, but in general, if you know how to use Facebook or any other similar social network, LinkedIn is somewhat comparable.