LinkedIn Offering Cool New Tools

LinkedIn is a great tool for research, net­work­ing, and keep­ing tabs on pro­fes­sion­als you know.  Some recent addi­tions to the plat­form have made it even bet­ter — appli­ca­tions and com­pany infor­ma­tion.  These new fea­tures have been out for a cou­ple weeks now, and they are very easy to uti­lize and can deliver some great results.

Appli­ca­tions — From plac­ing an Amazon.com list of book you have read to plac­ing a wid­get fea­tur­ing your lat­est blog posts, LinkedIn has added the abil­ity to use exter­nal appli­ca­tions to fur­ther dif­fer­en­ti­ate your page and add value to using the LinkedIn plat­form.  The Slideshares and Google Pre­sen­ta­tion wid­gets allow you to eas­ily embed slideshows within your page, while other appli­ca­tions like box.net allow you to upload files and col­lab­o­rate with con­nec­tions directly through LinkedIn.  While there are only 9 appli­ca­tions avail­able now, the list is sure to grow soon.  Still, those that they have added are absloutely worth tak­ing a look at imple­ment­ing into your profile.

Com­pany Pages — Have you ever used Hoovers Online to research a com­pany?  This is a sim­i­lar con­cept, but approaches it from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent angle.  While Hoovers offers up the view of a com­pany from the top, LinkedIn pro­vides a much more bottom-up view of a firm.  You can see where peo­ple who work at a com­pany tend to go to school, where they used to work, what pop­u­lar job titles are, and on and on.  LinkedIn takes the data attached to each indi­vid­ual pro­file and aggre­gates it into a very inter­est­ing and mean­ing­ful pro­file of an orga­ni­za­tion and its employ­ees.  Think­ing of call­ing on com­pany XYZ for some busi­ness?  Seach for them on LinkedIn and see what you can learn.

So go get on LinkedIn, update your pro­file, add some books to your read­ing list, and build your per­sonal brand.