Have you even heard of LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a giant community that gives professionals, students, companies, etc. to network with one another.

Now that you know what it is if you have never heard of it or wasn’t really sure what it was, we can get into why you should be ‘linked in’ on LinkedIn.

While in college we are paying attention to our academics, social life, job, and exploring opportunities. But, we are forgetting about the connection with our possible future.

We want to connect with people in our same field of interest or study and it is easy to this by connecting with them on LinkedIn.  Here are a few reasons that will make you ask yourself why you are not ‘linked in’.

1. Talk Business With Your Friends

LinkedIn is much more than just your social networking place like Facebook.  Think of it as the formal version of Facebook.

We go to Facebook to communicate with our friends and family and build other relationships that could be professional.

We go to LinkedIn to communicate with our friends and family and build other relationships that are nothing but professional. Communication is strictly for professional purposes only, because that is what it has been designed for.  You send messages (no wall posts) and make recommendations (no likes or comments).

It’s not like you are monitored to only act professional, just know that you are not going take any benefits away from LinkedIn if you treat it as if you were on Facebook or another social networking site.  You can talk business with your friends on Facebook and use LinkedIn as your promotional tool with your conversations or ideas.

2. Building a Quality ‘Resume’

We all know what resumes are.  They are a chance for us to grasp the attention from people we don’t know in hopes of a great opportunity.  There is so much we can or could say in our resume, but that one page heavily limits it.  The goal is to get to that second interaction with the people on the other side for that possible opportunity.

Imagine just putting your LinkedIn profile url address on our resume in respective size and font and that is it.

LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to prove your true self through any projects you have done throughout the years along with any connections or recommendations. Recommendations are your way of proving what you say you do is believable and true.

We want to prove everyone we are of adequate quality and too this we can build resume through continued professional connections.

3. Build Professional Relationships

Connections and networking are the main reasons people have reached to the point they are and tell a story of how they got there.

We need to fully utilize our resources.  Think about how people networked with each other before the web.  Now, we have Facebook, Twitter, and many more places that allow us to network and build relationships.

But, what happens is we are lazy and we use Facebook and other social networking sites to have fun and expand our social life.

LinkedIn allows for you to build those professional relationships.  Say you want to find a job. You visit a possible employer and they then look at your LinkedIn Profile. Here, they find a chance for them to explore your connections (people you know on LinkedIn, which are people you have built professional relationships with).  They will most likely explore your connections more in-depth and see if they recognize anyone.

When they notice that you have build a relationship with someone they have had already established a connection with, you are more in the door than in the lobby.

The LifeNotion: Building relationships and using communities to their full advantage, like LinkedIn, will get you farther.

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Community Discussion

How do you build professional relationships outside of LinkedIn?

I’ve talked to many people and they do not currently use LinkedIn, but do you feel the 3 reasons above would push you towards getting ‘linked in’?

by Derek Jensen

Derek is a 21-year-old college student that strives for inspiring others through his online presence. He is striving to inspire so many others and giving them the ability to inspire others as well. You will also find him talking about his passion with advertising and many other ideas and doing design work and consulting. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter.

Derek has published 37 inspirational posts for us.