LinkedIn Cheat Sheet: Mastering Brand Networking [Infographic]

When trying to reach out as a brand to new clients or customers, it’s ever more important to utilize social media. The major services available are all trying to make their networking process a lot more company friendly. Most of them started out as individual and personal networking services that connected people by either interests or friendships. However, there is a huge shift in how they all operate. To make it more appealing for companies to use their services, they are adding more and more business related features. Facebook and Twitter are great examples of that. Even Pinterest is doing it to some extent right now. It’s where the big money is so to speak.

LinkedIn has always been about business, and the ability to connect with new people who might become partners, collaborators or just contributors. So, why aren’t more people using LinkedIn as their branding network choice? If I were to take a guess, I’d say it’s because of their UI. For a beginner, it is highly confusing at times, and since I have been working with their API quite a bit lately, I have also seen that it lacks a lot of the straight forward calls that Facebook and Twitter do so well. This, to me, is a sign that the service is in need of a little overhaul in order to make it more user friendly.

Don’t get me wrong though, I really enjoy the service, and I have connected with a lot of great people through it. But in order to really utilize their great business idea, I think a simplification of it all is necessary. However, since that won’t happen anytime soon, and since it’s anything but a quick fix, I thought I’d hit up a useful infographic that might help beginners get a grip of this strongly strategic social networking service for business networking.

Mindflash (with help from Column Five Media) put together a great one called LinkedIn Boot Camp, which is aimed towards beginners as well as people who have been using it for a while but haven’t really gotten to the core of things. It outlines the service’s features step by step, and takes you through the most important procedures to maximize the impact of your presence. I greatly enjoy this infographic since it is straight forward but also visually appealing.

LinkedIn is a great way to connect with like-minded business related people, so don’t miss out on it all. Have a look at this and soak it all in. By the time you are done, I am sure you will be able to master this branding networking service like a boss. It’s all in the way we approach things. The more personal we allow ourselves to be, the more interesting people will think we are. So, get out there and do your very best to help, connect and interact. You will find that it’s really the best key to unlock this thing we call success.