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While some have christened LinkedIn “Facebook for business people,” it offers both more and less to small businesses than Facebook. Read on to see what LinkedIn can do for your company.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social networking tool that allows users to “connect” with other professionals in their industry. By connecting with acquaintances, users can be introduced to other users via mutual connections as well as give and receive trustworthy advice about businesses opportunities and potential employees from people they know.

Business profiles allow users to connect with coworkers in their company and allow other users to see who they know (by first and second degree) in that company. These searchable profiles show current and past employees, company stats and company specialties. Profiles may also include an RSS feed where users can share business news.

LinkedIn also features an Answers page, which is a popular hub where users can ask the LinkedIn population business-related questions, a Job Search page, and user-created groups where users can connect with other users who have similar business interests.

Why should I care?

LinkedIn has more than 39 million users, including execs from Fortune 500 companies. Executives and business consultants make up almost 60% of LinkedIn users, which means you’ll be networking with people who know how to help your business run smoother. The economic climate has also resulted in LinkedIn user growth, giving you an even wider network of brains to pick and new hires to consider!

Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn demands a professional, etiquette-based tone, which makes it easy to approach business colleagues and contacts. Instead of friending or following a new contact so you can see details of both their personal and professional lives, it’s clear that you want to connect with them for business purposes. Facebook and LinkedIn are both necessary for social media connectivity!

This “professionals only” setup has a great side effect: it removes some of the social pressure involved with networking. If you’re comfortable telling your contacts that you play Dungeons and Dragons every weekend (like me), you can share that in your interests. If you don’t, just don’t put it on your profile and they’ll never know.

For more information about how to use LinkedIn, watch their short and helpful introductory video.

Points to remember:

• LinkedIn is a social media platform used for professional networking
• You can find out who knows whom and get introduced to users you want to meet
• You can tap the LinkedIn hive mind for answers to your business questions
• LinkedIn is not a replacement for Facebook, and vice versa

Next up: How to create LinkedIn personal and company profiles. What do you want to know about them?