Using Social Networking to Build Professional Relationships – part 2

A quick
Googling turns up a number of outstanding social networking sites for
professionals such as:

  • Biznikhttp://biznik.com/  is an award winning community of entrepreneurs and small
    businesses dedicated to helping each other succeed.
  • Meetup – http://www.meetup.com/ is the world's largest network of local groups.
    Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of
    the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get
    together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of
    improving themselves or their communities.
  • Ecademy – http://www.ecademy.com/
    – A business network for creating contacts and sharing knowledge.
  • Jigsaw – http://www.jigsaw.com/ – Jigsaw is an online directory of free, downloadable Company
    information and more than 17 million business Contacts.
  • Others  – Fastpitch (http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/),
    PartnerUp (http://www.partnerup.com/),
    Perfectbusiness (http://www.perfectbusiness.com/)

The most
popular and widely used site for professionals though is LinkedIn –www.linkedin.com – and will by the focus for
the remainder of this article. According to the LinkedIn website they now have
over 53 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world.
A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of their
members are outside the U.S. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are
LinkedIn members.

One of my
favorite marketing guys is John Jantsch. John is a marketing and digital
technology coach (www.ducttapemarketing.com)
and he says, “Social media participation has proven to be a great way to cast a
wider net, create exposure for your expertise and initiate relationships with
partners, supplies, prospects and customers.” LinkedIn is the perfect platform
for doing each of the things John describes.