Is LinkedIn useful or useless? Here’s a smart way to use it – The Wall Street Journal

Is LinkedIn useful or useless? That's the question increasingly being asked by busy professionals of the social media platform that aims to facilitate business networking. Personally, I find LinkedIn very useful for reaching people fast when I am trying to track them down for urgent comment before a story is published. For me, LinkedIn is the 21st century equivalent of the old-fashioned telephone book that contained everyone's landline numbers. I also like connecting periodically with previous work colleagues to find out how they are doing or catch up on some office gossip. But, as far as building my career is concerned, LinkedIn doesn't on the surface appear to have offered much in the way of hard job offers. I'm also inundated with people I've never met trying to LinkIn. Ashley Mateo provides tips on how to use LinkedIn to your benefit, though one has to wonder whether LinkedIn is a platform that has had its time and is slowly going the way of social media fossils. – Jackie Cameron___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Is LinkedIn a Waste of Time?.By Ashley Mateo(The Wall Street Journal) – There are over 673 million users on LinkedIn, but "most people have an account because they've been told they should or need to have one — then they never use it or update it," said Andrew Selepak, PhD, director of the graduate program in social media at University of Florida.In recent years, LinkedIn has become a target of frustration in the social-media stratosphere: It's not fun or user-friendly, it's a bit ugly, and the site has become bogged down with spam connection requests and users' attempts to market products "versus building relationships, as it was intended for," said Lewis Goldstein, president of Blue Wind Marketing. "I get several messages a day from people who are trying to sell me something without even having a conversation."The site can also encourage posturing. It's disingenuous to accept every request to connect and then brag about your vast business networks when those networks actually yield little activity and few interactions. "Most people rarely have any professional content to share — we only change jobs so often or appear in national publications or earn new degrees," said Mr. Selepak. That's likely why users only spend about 17 minutes a month on LinkedIn compared with 35 minutes a day on Facebook, he added.LinkedIn can be a great place to find email addresses or, if you're hiring, scour resumes with little effort, but people tend to let their profiles atrophy, said Mr. Selepak. Plus: There's always the risk they'll be notified you're stalking them on LinkedIn.When DR. Bill Schindler first created a LinkedIn profile, he only did it so his students could tap his contacts and connections while hunting for internships and jobs. But while purging connection requests in 2015, the associate professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., came across a message from a casting director at the National Geographic network."I thought it was a joke, but decided to give her a call," he said. "Four months later I found myself on the African Savanna surrounded by a film crew." The show, "The Great Human Race," debuted in February 2016.His story may be rare, but at the very least, LinkedIn lets people connect with others in their industry; it's a living, digital resume you can send to potential employers and a tool used by recruiters to find better candidates. It's also a personal branding platform where you can distinguish yourself as a thought leader within your industry, said Aliza Licht, a digital consultant and author of "Leave Your Mark," a career guide for the social media era.Having a profile isn't enough, though. "Being present on LinkedIn is essential," said Ms. Licht. You should regularly post content relevant to your career — innovations by your employer, job openings you've heard of, industry shifts you've observed — on its home-page feed as you would on Facebook. "It's a great way to get eyeballs on your point of view, your values and your accomplishments," she said, which raises the likelihood of making connections and finding opportunities.

Is LinkedIn useful or useless? Here’s a smart way to use it – The Wall Street Journal

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