Another week goes by and a lot of great LinkedIn tips unearthed as well as cool coverage about our Data Analytics team at LinkedIn. As Sr. Social Media Manager at LinkedIn, I monitor the social media airwaves for business networking tips, tricks and news so you don’t have to. Here’s this week’s awesomeness!

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1. How can LinkedIn help you become a CEO? by Quentin Hardy

In a recent interview, Deep Nishar (who runs product at LinkedIn) shares some interesting insights into LinkedIn “data maps” that can help you identify your career path based on goals you’ve set for yourself. For e.g.

If you aim to be a chief financial officer of a 5,000-person company, for example, the data show you need to get an M.B.A. within nine years of starting work. Graduate from college with a physics degree and there is a 22% chance you’ll be a software engineer in two years.

The article also shares some interesting insights that only a site like LinkedIn can offer, such as:

He gets insights into American economic history (job switching almost doubled between 1970 and 2000, to 3.1 jobs a decade), résumé tips (“proven track record” is an overused phrase) and thoughts on fate (chief executives tend to have short names–like Jack, Amir and Boris).

Reminds me of a couple of our recent LinkedIn blog posts around the financial fallout as well as another post we did on job titles and ninjas.

2. Tips on networking right using LinkedIn by Lou Dubois

A rather lengthy, yet useful post on how best to transition all your old-school networking smarts to work for you on LinkedIn. Most of the tips may have been said before, but an often under-utilized yet highly effective tip is to use LinkedIn to check up on people when you attend events or conferences:

“When I go to a conference or networking event, I’m able to research the speakers and attendees online and see who I’m most interested in talking or listening to,” says Darling. “In years past, you were stuck with a pamphlet and a three-line bio of folks, but now you can find out so much more. If it’s someone I’m really interested in, I’ll send them an email ahead of time with the header ‘Look Forward to Meeting You at the Conference’ and try to set up a time to talk.”

I think LinkedIn (more than either Twitter or Facebook) is a great way to showcase the speakers and their recommendations on an event or conference site. It’s always been one of my pet peeves and something I’ll continue bugging Hugh Forrest at SXSW about, the next time I see him 🙂

Another great example of similar usage would be LinkedIn integration on sites like Plancast or EventBrite. I love both these services and use it all the time. Thought, they use LinkedIn as one of the three key social networking sites to share event info. I think LinkedIn profiles  would be far more valuable in the attendee listings.

It’d be even better if they could pull in LinkedIn mini-profiles when you mouseover the LinkedIn profile id of the attendees. That’d make my job connecting with the right folks even before the event, a cinch.

But, I digress. I should probably write a separate post on this topic sometime soon. If you’ve thoughts on this, please leave a comment.

3. The mega LinkedIn tips and tricks section by David Spark and Kristin Burnham

This 5 page article covers a broad swath of LinkedIn tips from proper connection etiquette to LinkedIn and Twitter (to sync or not to sync – something I covered here). It feels like a collection of recent tips and tricks and I’d recommend you bookmark the piece for reference, though you may tend to get lost in it. My favorite tip is around Company Follow, a recent feature that I’ve seen professionals increasingly adopt given its obvious benefits.

LinkedIn announced a new feature that lets you “follow” companies on the professional networking site and keep track of their key developments, potential business opportunities and job leads. This tool is especially helpful for job seekers who want to keep tabs on businesses to which they’ve applied, and for businesses looking to monitor their competitors’ announcements.

Imagine a feed of information around a company minus all the noise, with relevant info on key developments, bizdev and job opportunities only. Learn more on LinkedIn’s Company Follow here.

Bonus Tips: 5 ways PR pros can use LinkedIn, 10 unique ways to craft a LinkedIn status update

If you find other posts that share unique tips on leveraging social networking for your career or business, feel free to share or leave a comment on this post.

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