LinkedIn

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What Does LinkedIn Mean?

LinkedIn (LI) is a professional networking website. While other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace focus more on personal and social networking. LinkedIn allows professionals to create and maintain career-oriented business connections and promote their services or professional skills.

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Since it was founded in 2002, LinkedIn has become one of the top sites in the world for professional networking.

Techopedia Explains LinkedIn

Users on LinkedIn maintain professional profiles, including such details as their educational background, work or employment history, list of major projects and professional accomplishments, professional certifications, and membership to professional bodies. All this information is placed in the user’s “Profile” section.

LinkedIn is also a resource for recruiters. Because of the wealth of detailed, searchable professional data, the site has turned into a valuable tool for recruiters and recruitment agencies as well as job seekers. In fact, the job seeking and job placement abilities of LinkedIn have morphed into one of its most-used features. To aid in this, LinkedIn provides a “Follow” feature so that users may be kept abreast of an organization’s job offers in addition to other news about the organization.

LI’s other notable features are:

  • Members can post photos and view the profiles and photos of other users.
  • Members can view how many people have searched for and viewed them recently, although more detailed information requires an paid upgrade to a premium account.
  • Employers can list jobs and openings and search for potential candidates.
  • LI allows embedding or tying of applications, such as an Amazon reading list that displays a list of books the member has read or purchased from Amazon.
  • A “Groups” feature, in which anyone can form a group for like-minded professionals and members can hold discussions, post jobs and write articles.
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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.