LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for professionals. Believe it or not it has been around for longer than Facebook & Twitter! There are over 650 million users across more than 200 countries. It is a place to network, learn, grow, and develop. Regardless of your industry, role, and career stage, you will likely see a lot of benefits from hopping on LinkedIn!

Who should use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a platform for anyone who wants to grow and develop in their career. You may be an executive at a multinational, a fresh graduate, a student, or someone in the middle.

Happily employed professionals and job seekers can use LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest break throughs in their space, to research potential future employers and teammates, to learn about life at one company over another. Employers and businesses can share updates about their business and team, industry trends and innovations, and vacancies within their team.

LinkedIn is incredibly valuable for recruiters and hiring managers too – not only to share tips for the entire job search process, but also to find great candidates for their roles. LinkedIn has an amazing candidate search tool, which can work wonders for some of the tougher-to-fill roles.

In other words, if you are working or want to be working, you probably want to be on LinkedIn.

Here are our top 5 reasons why you should be on LinkedIn:

Keep Up with Your Industry

The world is moving incredibly quickly. Staying up to date with industry news, trends, and innovation can be overwhelming. LinkedIn is a great way to help you out in this endeavour. You can connect with and follow other people in your industry, other companies, various groups, and see everything that they are sharing and posting which is often at the forefront of technology and solutions.

Contribute to the Conversation

LinkedIn is the perfect place for thought leaders – if you want to be recognised as having a valuable voice in a particular area, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform on which to share your expertise and opinions. You can write longer form content using LinkedIn’s built-in publishing platform, but you can also post bite-sized insights and everything inbetween. You can share media, video, and links to your other online content.

Use your LinkedIn content to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. It is a great way to get your skills and services in front of potential clients, customers, or employers.

Use LinkedIn as an Extension of your CV

Your LinkedIn profile can and should contain essentially all of the content that is on your CV. However, your profile is also a great way to showcase more of who you are than would be strictly appropriate on a CV. Use LinkedIn to build on your professional ‘brand’ and present yourself as a great candidate for employers to engage and hire.

Post, comment, share examples of your work. LinkedIn really is a wonderful tool to build a professional online persona. The key thing to remember here is that LinkedIn is treated differently to Facebook and other social media platforms – where those tend to be considered separate from and irrelevant to someone’s professional life, your LinkedIn is very likely to be seen by hiring managers and recruiters, so don’t do anything on LinkedIn you wouldn’t want a potential employer or client to see.

Get a Job!

LinkedIn’s Job Board: LinkedIn is fantastic for anyone looking for a new job opportunity. LinkedIn has a great job board where companies can post vacancies – you can search for a role as you would on other job boards: by location, keywords, industry, experience level, and salary.

See Job Vacancy Posts in Your Feed: Hiring managers and recruiters will also share job openings direct to their company page or personal feed. If you follow them you will see openings and quickly be able to apply, or even reach out and express your interest with a direct message!

Let a Job Come to You: Last but not least – a job could fall into your lap! Thousands of recruiters are using LinkedIn’s Premium Search feature to find candidates. As long as you have a well-built profile, a recruiter will be able to find you and connect to talk about a job – without you having to do anything! This is great for anyone who doesn’t want to spend much time active on LinkedIn.

Build and Maintain your Network

LinkedIn is a super easy way to keep tabs on your network as well as create new connections. LinkedIn saves you the effort of trying to remember who someone is and what they do – it is all built into their profile.

Keep in touch with old colleagues and forge new relationships. LinkedIn is especially useful to connect with non-local professionals, who you might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet.

If you haven’t already done so, create a LinkedIn profile today! It is fairly easy to get started and you don’t need to be super active on LinkedIn to get a lot out of it.

Don’t be scared off by the ‘social-media’ label; LinkedIn may look and function similarly to Facebook, however, the ‘feel’ and culture on the platform is very different. The content is typically of better quality, and is certainly more professionally relevant. You can very easily avoid the toxicity common to many other social media platforms.

While you’re at it, follow Scitex on LinkedIn!

-Scitex