Why should someone with a job spend time with Linkedin?

This is why I think LinkedIn is great. I’ve posted before about LinkedIn’s “answers” functionality, which I use all the time. Today I saw a question asked by Martin Brossman that I thought would be worth sharing:

Here are a few strong points that come out of the 27 or so answers submitted to the question:

No Job is Secure
It’s true. Things are getting pretty tough these days, and I’ve been hearing about longtime, senior-level employees being layed-off. The only two things you can do about this are to ensure that you are needed as well as to be well-connected in the event that your employer decides you’re no longer needed. LinkedIn can help you network as well as to have your qualifications available to employers you don’t even know about. (If you have a profile, notice how the right sidebar contains listings for open positions matching your current title.)

LinkedIn can help you be better at your current job.
This is even more important than the networking capabilities of LinkedIn. The “answers” feature can really help you learn things that might end up being integral to your personal job retention or job growth. I’ve gotten in the habit of asking a question on LinkedIn in preparation for every newsletter I write for Newfangled. Also, there are many groups put together on LinkedIn, consisting of people who are very likely to connect you to ideas, resources and other people that will enrich you and develop you.

Recently, we set up a group called Web Development for Advertising Agencies. We want to use this as a marketing tool since our positioning is tightly toward mid-sized agencies, but we also want to use it as a means of connecting others to ideas and gathering information fromour network that will help us to serve them better. The best part? It’s all free.

Targeted Advertising
We also advertise on LinkedIn. We set up a simple advertisement, which is targeted to agency people with an interest in web development, about a month ago. You can see from the screenshot below that while it’s not generating huge traffic to our site, it is generating good traffic. The first listing below is for the landing page on our site which is linked from our LinkedIn advertisement. You can see that it has generated only 30 unique visits since December 8 (not bad for during the holidays, actually), but the average pages per visit has been 6, and the average time on the site a bit over 4 minutes! The bounce rate for users that click this link is only 20%. This means that users that click our ad link are getting the kind of information from our site that they need. You’ll also notice that there are many other pages that are receiving traffic referred from LinkedIn. These are going to be as a result of our profiles, answering questions, and posting links in LinkedIn group discussions. In general, this traffic is also pretty good- notice the 20% bounce rate to our Web Development for Advertising Agencies landing page. Since advertising on LinkedIn is so cheap, these stats are more than we could have ever hoped for!

There are many other points that I could make about the benefits of LinkedIn, but take a look at the original question for now- there’s lots of good stuff from many different LinkedIn users already in there.