LinkedIn is one of my favorite social networks. For a number of reasons. It is my personal and professional rolodex. I belong to a number of groups where I can not only tap into the expertise of others, but share my own. It is a platform that allows me to not only share my electronic resume with others, but also connect with new people with similar interests and experiences. And now LinkedIn is even more social than ever.
LinkedIn has more than 70 million users (~50% international) and has over 1 million Company Profiles. Over the past several months the platform has been focusing on adding more social features to broaden its reach across the web. And though it is questionable how truly ‘big’ these enhancements are in contributing to the platform’s growth long-term, I do believe they are rather impactful. We are social creatures afterall and we love new features that make it easier to collaborate, share content and connect with each other. It will also be easy for brands to identify influencers inside LinkedIn communities as well (a rather important capability).
Here is the list of the new features that LinkedIn added over the past several months:
- Groups received total facelift as well as several new ‘social’ functionalities. One of the significant changes in the Groups experience is the ability to curate new content and vote on shared content by liking and commenting on discussions with a “like” button. “Liked” content is highlighted. You can also see who has liked a conversation to get a sense for topics that group members are gravitating toward. Group members now have an ability to get email alerts when select members of a group participate by simply following a member of the group. One of the features that I personally am very excited about – LinkedIn will begin to highlight active group participants as “top influencers”. See a 3-min demo on the new Group features.
- Twitter Integration. LinkedIn has integrated Twitter and later added the Tweets application that allows you to synch your LinkedIn connections with the folks you are following on Twitter.
- Sharing Features. When you share a news article, LinkedIn will now allow you to customize what the excerpt of the news article you are linking to. LinkedIn has also stepped up its attribution in terms of sharing, by attributing something you re-share to the person who shared it with you. Users also now get complete control over who sees what they are sharing, whether it’s everyone, their connections, a group, or a specific individual.
- LinkedIn launched its first native application for the Blackberry
- Huddle Workspaces – a private online work spaces for secure team collaboration, document sharing and discussions within the LinkedIn network.
- Introduced Company Profiles and ability for folks to follow a company of their choosing so that they can stay abreast of the latest company’s news, announcements, job openings, etc.
- Announced richer, more powerful search APIs for developers who are working on integrating the platform into their business applications.
- Introduced URL shortener – Lnkd.in for any links shared from its site.
- Improved look and feel and functionality of the Inbox
Did I miss any others? And what do you think – are these enhancements impactful enough or is LinkedIn lacking in truly ‘big’ ideas that could help platform’s long-term growth and popularity?