Very few people realize that LinkedIn is the greatest tool in the world.  The social media network allows you to connect with many different kinds of business contacts, be they, potential customers, competition, possible collaborators, business support associates or vendors.  The various and numerous Groups that you can join, that are specific to your interest or industry, are just amazing.  Each Group offers a place to start a Discussion, post a News item, or a Job opening.  I have been using LinkedIn for about a year now and each time I log in, it is with a goal in mind.

My first foray into the LinkedIn world of Answers was when I was looking for a complicated, programmable, multi-line telephone system that would run strictly over the Internet.  It took about 5 minutes before I received my first answer.  I’m not sure who the person was, but they had a raving review of a certain company that provided exactly what I was looking for.  After that first answer rolled in, I received so many more that I stopped reading them.  I even got a phone call from someone trying to help me.  Well, I was impressed with this service!  It was like ask.com without all the work!

I have been using the Answers section in LinkedIn every time I have an issue or question that I would need to dig deep to find the answer.  Why should I continue to dig if the experts are out there and willing to share?  This is a great service!

The other wonderful tool is Groups.  If you don’t belong to both Groups that are directly aligned with your business and the Groups where your clients and customers hang out, you are making a mistake.  Recently, I having been helping a client with social media marketing.  He had a new idea and wanted to see how consumers would react.  I posted his information in the Discussion area on all 29 Groups that he belongs to.  The discussions began and wow, did we learn a lot.  We learned so much that he now has a new venue to sell his product in that neither one of us knew about.  This new venue has 8500 shoot-off website with tens of thousands of sales people in the Country.  That post certainly was worth the hour and a half that I spent writing the post and actually posting it.

So, the moral of today’s post is – Have a question? Post it on LinkedIn Answers. Need to know what someone thinks? Post it as a discussion in relevant Groups on LinkedIn

Tags: LinkedIn, social marketing, social media, social networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Marketing: Social & Traditional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.