By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team – 

The Empire State Building may not be the tallest building in NYC (that honor goes to the newly minted Freedom Tower) but it definitely has the distinction of being “high” tech, playing host to LinkedIn.

It has been over a year since LinkedIn acquired Pulse, a mobile news reading application that claims over 30 million users. By focusing on personalized news, LinkedIn has made a serious commitment to engage users with content. There is no better way to grow your business and knowledge than to distribute information via news aggregation and business connections.

Now that they are well over the transition, it’s time to take these two powerful platforms to the next level.

Connecting business people is what LinkedIn does best. At this point it is second nature for most professionals to connect and to trust this powerful business platform. So what comes next?

…Growing your business and making connections! This is always on a professional’s mind. Learning about your work from some of your peers and sharing relevant information about your profession will take you down that path.

Good Morning…and Good Night!

LinkedIn wants to be the first place you go when you wake up in the morning, and the last thing you check before going to bed by feeding you a steady resource diet of news relevant to your profession. In brief, it is becoming the Face(book) of professionals – online.

LinkedIn has opened up new horizons in the publishing world to its members and giving them a powerful tool to build their professional brand. Now your published content becomes part of your profile, is shared with your network and offers you the ability to build your own group of followers. That’s powerful stuff!

From Boardroom to Laptop

With its launch of “Influencers”, LinkedIn gives you access to trusted industry luminaries and to follow their professional insights and career advice. LinkedIn Influencers include Bill Gates, Deepak Chopra MD, Jack Welch, Arianna Huffington, Mark Cuban – and a virtual list of who’s who!

Takeaways:

LinkedIn offers members an array of benefits, including:

• Publishing material visible to connections not on their networks
• The ability to follow other members outside of your network
• When you publish original content on LinkedIn it becomes part of your profile for all to see and share
• Your original content is shared with your professional network
• Build new groups of followers that can help grow your business
• You can continue to share your expertise
• Connect with other influencers, read and share their news and industry information
• LinkedIn is building an influencer program and opening its publishing abilities to members, thus giving them a powerful vehicle to communicate their knowledge in multiple languages with their connections.

Connecting the Digital Dots

LinkedIn (Pulse) is changing the landscape on how we receive our news, interact with newsmakers and share our insights. It’s a brave new wired world and LinkedIn is helping you connect your digital dots.

Photo Caption: LinkedIn grafitti graphic displayed in the New York office