We’ve talked a lot about different social media sites and what they can do for your small business, but I wanted to highlight one that often goes overlooked: LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an organized network of professionals from around the globe and over 170 industries. Using LinkedIn allows individuals to find, be introduced to, and collaborate with other qualified professionals that they need to work with to accomplish their goals. Today LinkedIn has over 50 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world.

It’s important to point out that unlike other online social media sites like Facebook or MySpace, where users predominantly share images of their kids and play online games, LinkedIn is a more professional network that is used to share your specialized expertise and accomplishments. The mission of LinkedIn is to connect professionals and make them more productive and successful in their day-to-day professional lives.

Once you are signed up with LinkedIn (it’s free to join), you can connect with individuals by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your “network” consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, which in turn will link you to a large number of qualified professionals and experts. In short, make sure you connect with folks that you know and trust.  LinkedIn isn’t a popularity contest to see how many connections you can make blindly.

While a lot of today’s popularity for LinkedIn is focused around job searching/recruiting, the site still holds great value for your small business. Here are a couple examples:

• Find and be introduced to service providers who can help grow your small business.
• The ability to create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems you are having with your business.
• Have a presence online for other small business owners to connect with you for business opportunities and find potential partners.
• LinkedIn Answers (similar to Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers) allows users to ask questions for the community to answer. The main differences from the other services are that questions are more business-oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering questions is known, making answers to your small business questions more credible.
• When your company is ready to expand you can post and distribute job listings to find the best talent for your company.

Have you used LinkedIn to build connections with other small business professionals? What have your experiences been?

Stay tuned for future posts from me discussing other benefits to LinkedIn and how it can help build success for your small business.