By Brandon
LinkedIn, the popular social network for businesses, has gone through some big changes recently. It’s still one of the only social networks to go against Facebook and hold it’s own. While many of LinkedIn’s recent improvements bare strikingly similar properties to features on Facebook, some of them do not and are quite innovative. We’re going to look at seven of my favorite recent new features in this article. All of these were implemented within the last quarter. Pretty impressive!
1. Integration with Microsoft Outlook
With the release of Microsoft Office 2010 Outlook will have LinkedIn integrated into it. Users will be able to keep up with their Connections’ Network Updates, email their Connections, and manage their inbox all from within Microsoft Outlook. Users will also be given a quick link to add or invite people to their LinkedIn network. This way, when your new prospect emails you, you can quickly add them to your LinkedIn account with a simple click. I know not everyone will use LinkedIn in Outlook, but it will certainly bring in a lot of new users who just don’t remember to visit the website or never got the hang of it. Now that it’s integrated into something we all do, it’ll be easier for it to become a habit for a lot of us.
2. Follow In Groups
If you’re like me you want to keep your Connections as sincere as possible and only add those people who you actually know or have worked with. But sometimes you find some great thinker or similar spirits in some of the groups you participate in. While it wouldn’t really make sense to invite them into your network you still want to be able to follow them easily. Enter the Follow In Group feature that allows you to follow the activities of other users within the groups you both belong to. Sounds like a perfect compromise.
3. Faceted Search
LinkedIn greatly updated their search feature by adding 8 facets to each search you perform. Now your results can be narrowed down by Current Company, Past Company, Location, Relationship, Industry, School, Groups and Profile Language. If something still can’t be found with all of that, then it’s probably not there anyway.
4. New Navigation System
This one was sorely needed. The team at LinkedIn move most of the navigation to a horizontal, drop down menu across the top. While drop down menus aren’t always the best solution, this one is very reliable and nicely organized. The best part is that freed up a lot of real estate lower on the page which then allowed the important information on the page to move up as well and make it easier to find. Great solution.
5. Syncing with Twitter
Everyone who’s anyone started syncing with Twitter last year and LinkedIn was no different. However, they orchestrated the syncing in a pretty smart way. I don’t know about you but I don’t feel confident that 100% of my tweets belong on a forum as professional as the profile of my business identity, but a lot of them are. To solve this, they created a super simple way to filter what’s posted from Twitter and what’s not. Once you’ve got the account connected you can chose to turn on a filter that only posts from Twitter to LinkedIn if the tweet contains “#in”. Easy to remember and effective.
6. Developer Network
Now this is very similar to Facebook opening up it’s platform for developers, but I still think it’s a great think for LinkedIn and anyone who uses it. We saw how quickly we started seeing nearly all website allowing users to connect to their site through Facebook and reporting back their activity. Hopefully something similar will be done with LinkedIn as well as some surprising, new ways of using it, too. This one is still pretty new so it’s something to watch in the future.
7. The New iPhone App
The biggest news from LinkedIn for me was the complete redesign of their iPhone app. Their previous one was fine but there wasn’t much to it and not much you could do. In the new one you can search, mark profiles as favorites, change your Network Update and view others’, send and receive messages. You’ve also got a fully functional address book and allows you to transfer contact information between two people when they bump their phones. Pretty sweet. Download it for your phone here.
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Tags: Brandon D Hunt, Developer Network, Facebook, Faceted Search, iPhone, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Outlook, Twitter
About the Author
Brandon is our Vice President of Digital Communications. When he's not following cutting edge technology or learning the latest design techniques he can be found pursuing his passion for art and illustration or playing with his two dogs.
