Drive Traffic with LinkedIn

By now, you know that I love when challenging a preconceived notion or showing that a tool can be used for more than you might think on first glance. Those ah ha moments tickle me, so I am hoping that you’ll have one of those moments today as I explain the newest features on LinkedIn.

Normally, LinkedIn is seen as a business and networking tool, often a way to get a job or pass your resume around. It certainly doesn’t have the social networking reputation that Twitter and Facebook have developed. But with changes to the site itself, the high-income demographic that uses this site, and some entrepreneurs coming forward to prove that it does drive significant traffic to their blogs, there is now evidence to show that LinkedIn can, in the words of Chris Crum, “bring a different brand of relevance to the table.”

Here are some of the newest changes to LinkedIn:

- Users have the ability to control who sees what they are sharing, either by individual, groups, or connections.
- Facebook has proven that images and article excerpts increase traffic to a linked site or discussion, and LinkedIn now has this capability too. According to LinkedIn, “The chances of someone clicking through your shared article are greater when you’ve images and brief excerpts pulled from the news article or blog post.” Plus, you can customize it completely.
- Users can now see, edit, and delete their status updates.
- Re-sharing content has become pretty common on social sites, and Twitter even has a term for it: retweeting. LinkedIn now allows its users to share content with the click of a button. This is a perfect tool for “making content go viral”.
- Off-site sharing has been improved, so that content sites can “offer a similar sharing process for LinkedIn to its own internal re-share feature”. You can share directly to LinkedIn when you find something that intrigues you from a popular news site or a great blog post.
- LinkedIn has implemented a URL shortener (Lnkd.in).
- When posting an article, users now give credit to the source they got it from by employing a “via-style” credit.

- Keeping your profile in the eye of an audience who will help drive traffic to your business is important. Now, when you choose to make shared items