Many social networking websites have a business aspect, even if that’s not their primary purpose – after all there’s always buyers and sellers looking to do business. But there’s one social networking website that is specifically made for businesses and professionals – LinkedIn.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn is in a rapid growth phase. With 120 million members worldwide, and 2.3 million in Australia, LinkedIn grew 17% from January to July 2011. Many LinkedIn users are educated professionals in middle and upper management.

One of the basic uses of LinkedIn is as an online resume. It’s always available, can be kept up to date easily, and can be found by businesses looking for particular skills and experience.

Businesses (called companies) can have their own profile page, which others can follow. This is similar to how Facebook business pages work.

It’s the unique way the networking system operates that has given it the status of a trust network. When making a new connection, LinkedIn will ask how you know the person – you can’t just connect with anyone.

Your profile page shows not only your direct connections, but those who are two degrees away (connections of connections) and three degrees away (connections of connections of connections). If you want to connect with someone in your extended network (2nd and 3rd degree connections) you need to get an introduction from a 1st degree connection. It’s this referral system of networking which adds a level of trust and reliability to the network.

To connect with someone outside your network, you can use a premium paid option called InMail, which will send a professionally presented message to the contact.

There is a comprehensive search system, allowing you to find people by industry, location, company, relationship and more, making it a valuable market research tool.

To reinforce the trust factor, there is a recommendation system, whereby individuals can add recommendations to the profiles of their connections.

LinkedIn has a whole section devoted to connecting job seekers and job vacancies (www.linkedin.com/jobs). There are also paid options with extra benefits like introductions to companies you’re seeking employment with, and what they call ‘talent filters’, which allow highly targeted searches.

For up to the minute trends and news in your industry, have a look at LinkedIn Today. Presented in the style of an online newspaper, it presents the latest news from your industry and network. Stories that appear are determined what is most popular, so you get the best of what’s happening right now.

Answers is a section where you can ask questions and get answers from those in your network. You can read through questions and answers from others, and you have the option to supply your own answers.

If you’re still wondering whether it’s worth being on LinkedIn or other social networking sites, consider that your competitors and customers already are, or soon will be, and that’s probably the most compelling reason why businesses need to make the move, or have a good reason not to.

I was in Brisbane for a few days last week with my family, and not having spent a lot of time in that city, I don’t necessarily know all the good places to go and things to do. Many times I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the Foursquare app to see what was around.

Foursquare is one of a number of location aware apps that knows where you are and tells you what’s in your immediate location. You can explore what’s around by category, for example restaurants. To narrow down the results, I searched for Indian – there were several but they were on the other side of town – too far to walk.

The I searched for the most popular restaurants. With each restaurant, you can see tips that have been left by other people who have been there. We read the tips left by the top restaurant and there were 22 rave reviews. So that’s where we went, and it really was a great dining experience (the restaurant was Vapiano).

On Foursquare, once you get to a place, you can ‘check in’, and have the option of notifying your friends, and even posting your location to your Facebook and Twitter account.

There is a marketing component to all this that businesses can take advantage of. A business can offer deals to those who check in, which in turn promotes the business to the customers online friend network, which can be substantial.

Also, when in an area that you are unfamiliar with, you can not only see what’s around, but also see what deals are being offered to Foursquare users. The place offering the best deal might just get your business.

Foursquare is a great tool, but it may well be left behind by the newly launched Facebook Places, which is a similar concept, but with 10 million Australians already using Facebook, they have a big head start.

Location based social networking services – they really are the next big thing.

It’s a good idea to write regular articles, or blog, on your website if you want to increase traffic (and who doesn’t!).

If you do this, you can automatically send notification to your Facebook , Twitter and other social media accounts.

This way, everything you write gets sent out to your network, and links back to your website.

There are a number of ways to set up a system like this, for example, you can add the RSS feed from your blog to third party website Twitterfeed, which will then post updates to your Twitter account.

As more people spend more time in social networks, that is where you should be sending your content.

Having a Twitter and Facebook page that’s regularly updated will bring more traffic to your website.

But just a minute, I hear you say, I don’t have time to go around updating all those websites – I don’t even really know what they’re all about!

Well, you don’t have to! What you do need is regular content, and if you’re in business that shouldn’t be a problem.

New products, specials, industry trends, client profiles, testimonials, general news, press releases – this is the kind of information you should be generating as a business, and at a frequency greater than once per month.

The best place to publish these things is in a blog attached to your website. From there everything can be automated – publish once and distribute to many places instantly.

To find out more, contact Arrowsmith Websites for a free consultation.