After being live for over a decade, LinkedIn has become the dominant social networking site for professionals across the globe.
With 443 million members in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn has become a sales and marketing power tool for business-themed interactions online.
So what’s changing? Here are a few LinkedIn adjustments you need to be aware of:
It’s no longer just a “jobs” website
Yes you can still hire employees or find a job using LinkedIn, and a lot of their revenue does come from job posting services and paid recruiting still. But, if you still believe LinkedIn isn’t much more than a glorified version of a job board, you haven’t been paying enough attention.
Read LinkedIn’s stated goal from 2014: “Beginning the next decade of LinkedIn, we sought to create a map of the digital economy, its participants, and every facet of opportunity linking these nodes together.” Right now, LinkedIn is spending billions of dollars to get its hands into seemingly “every facet of opportunity” that currently exists in the business world.
Listed below are just three examples, with each one offering you a great opportunity to build your business or brand as part of the process.
- Freelance marketplace
LinkedIn recently launched its new ProFinder service several months ago, and it’s rapidly progressing. Modelled after popular freelance-for-hire sites such as Upwork, LinkedIn’s ProFinder matches customers looking for a specific type of product or service with a qualified professional person.
Because they have so much user data, LinkedIn have the ability to easily show you the best prospects for a freelance project or ongoing service you need based on categories, keywords or search terms you put into ProFinder.
They can even filter search results based on who you’re already connected to, recommendations, physical location and more.
- Online training courses
LinkedIn dropped 1.5 billion dollars in 2015 to buy Lynda.com (online training website) for a very specific reason – training sells.
While the transition between them has been on the down low so far, we’re soon going to see much more of a direct presence on LinkedIn in terms of online training courses being offered both for free and at a charge.
To tell you how big online learning is, in 2011, about £30 billion was spent on self-pace e-learning worldwide. In 2014, e-learning was a £50 billion industry – that number was expected to double by the end of 2015.
As well as buying Lynda.com’s existing supply of courses, we predict that LinkedIn will start letting you and me upload our training programmes as well.
- Publishing/content marketing
As well as sharing and distributing professional content thanks to partnerships with massive industry news outlets and publications, LinkedIn is also hugely encouraging crowd-sourcing. In fact, they now give you the ability to publish native blog posts along with embedding everything from tweets to podcasts right inside the platform.
With today’s online marketplace, you have to earn people’s time and attention. Content is the key to earning that right, and LinkedIn wants you sharing as much of your own as possible inside their network. They reward the most well-liked, highest-engaged content by featuring them on its “Pulse” new channels; exposing people’s work to tonnes of people they hadn’t even dreamt of reaching.
LinkedIn’s detailed analytics show you each and every person who is engaging with your content, which gives you the opportunity to cultivate warm leads in an efficient, targeted way.
So where is it all heading?
We think LinkedIn is expected to expand in a massive way based on how these initiatives play out in the next few years to come. But whatever happens, LinkedIn is becoming more intriguing by the week – something you wouldn’t ever expect to see from what many journalists often call a “boring” social network.
