Why You Should Be on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the smartest networking tools today. In a nutshell, it can be described as the “professional” Facebook with the main focus of job seeking, recruiting, and making business connections. Although LinkedIn has significantly fewer users than Facebook, it is changing the way business people network themselves and how job seekers find opportunities.

Being a senior at Georgia Southern University and currently job seeking, I have found LinkedIn to be one of the best ways for recruiters to find me for job opportunities.  I began using LinkedIn by connecting with other Georgia Southern alumni, friends, and family members as well as joining groups where jobs are posted almost every single day such as Kappa Delta Alumni.

During my summer internship working for a recruiting company, I found LinkedIn was the most important tool in searching for candidates and like most people, I realized I was not taking advantage of the social networking site like I should have been. From being active on the platform, I concluded that there are 3 major benefits of using LinkedIn –

1. Making the right connections.  Not just any connection is a good one, but those who you connected with and engaged with intentionally turn out to be better and more meaningful connections.

2. Building a network. By making those right connections, you are building a network that you can look to for opinions, sources and even jobs.

3. The level of your activity equates your level of LinkedIn success. The more active you use the platform, the more success you’ll see and the more connections you’ll make.

Most college students spend the majority of their time using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram when in reality we should all be focusing the majority of our time on LinkedIn. We are essentially in college to get a job, so why are we not taking LinkedIn as seriously as we need to?

LinkedIn is THE most essential tool for job seeking and recruiting and many opportunities can be missed by simply not being active on the site. I believe college students, job seekers and business professionals need get on LinkedIn and start connecting, build your network and profile, and BE ACTIVE!