It is not a deep secret how social media has become part and parcel of our life. The purpose of social media or networks is to connect people globally, which was once considered a hassle and costly. From communicating with people to finding jobs and online advertisements, social networks became a massive part of every individual.
Social networking involves the establishment and development of personal and business relationships using tech. When building business relationships with many people on social platforms, they mostly use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Before diving deep into the main topic, we have to go through some numerical data to understand the significance of various social media platforms.
According to Brian Dean on BACKLINKO, since the initial stage of social media in 1996, it has infiltrated half of the 7.7 billion people worldwide. In the last decade, there was an enormous increase in the user base on social media platforms. Overall, there were 970 million users on social network platforms in 2010, which increased to 3.81 billion people in 2020.
It almost tripled in 10 years. Let that sink into your head for a moment. 58.11% of the world’s population is active on social media. 83.36% of the whole internet users (4.57 billion) are active users.
Here’s another fact that will help you understand why it is essential to professionally use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In the last year, the average number of social media accounts is 8.8 per person. The growth in the number of accounts per person is up 83.33%, from 4.8 accounts per person in 2014 to 8.8 in 2020.
According to the above numerical data, there was a time social media like Facebook and Twitter were used for fun but not anymore. It is an essential part of how people communicate and a significant portion of how task gets done from corporation to government.
Above all the social platforms, Facebook obtains the most visibility. To build a professional relationship with co-workers, boss, and other essential profile people, you have to maintain a standard way of networking.
There is no doubt about how big of a professional network LinkedIn is! People need to use it optimally, and I will talk more about it later. Twitter has approximately 328 million users where you can tweet something which is limited to 140 characters.
It is more conversational than other platforms, and people can connect with many important profile people here. So it is necessary to maintain professionalism on Twitter, and there are several ways to do it, which I will mention later in this article.
Brief History of The Most Popular Social Networks!
Whenever we try to know specific tech-related issues, we have to go back and learn how it all started—basically, the origin or history. So, here I will briefly write about how Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have started before jumping into the main issue.
The journey of Facebook began the same week a teenager named Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on 4th February 2004. The site became an instant hit, and it is called “thefacebook.com.” Who would have believed that this site would become one of the biggest websites in the world, which would be visited by 400 million people a month, right?
The story began in 2003 when Mark Zuckerberg created an online program named “Facemash.” This site allowed users to objectify fellow students by comparing their faces and choosing who they deemed more beautiful. Mark certainly faced punishment for his misdeed and almost got expelled from the college, but this site was the framework that provided the root of the journey of Facebook.
In 2002, an online site named “face book” already existed, and there were features like photos of students alongside information about them. This was the initial idea that Mark took from them, and he did what “face book” couldn’t do, which is expanding the network for the whole of Harvard and later globally.
The Winklevoss twins and Narendra went to Mark asking for his help in creating a social network for Harvard students, initially planning to name it “HarvardConnection.” Mark Zuckerberg then took their idea. He modified it before going for the big move.
Did you guys see the Oscar-winning movie “The Social Network,” which was released in 2010? If you didn’t, I would recommend you watch it. This film explores the claim of the Winklevoss twins. The film explores how the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg faced a lawsuit.
Eventually, all three parties involved in it settled the dispute in 2008, which included 1.2 million shares in the company each.
When Facebook started its journey, it became extremely popular with Harvard students. After a while, the site was also made available to students at Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. After that, it started expanding to other colleges.
In 2004, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, was named president of Facebook. He discovered Facebook while he was browsing the computer of a student at Stanford and later connected with Zuckerberg and Saverin.
During that time, Facebook had changed its headquarters to Palo Alto, which was situated in California. In 2005 Mark Zuckerberg cut Saverin from Facebook, which was deeply explored in “The Social Network.” Saverin later filed a lawsuit outside the court, and the settlement was not completely disclosed in the movie.
Since the beginning of its journey, Facebook was always behind Myspace, but in 2008, it went ahead of Myspace as the most-visited social media site in the entire world. Facebook introduced the newsfeed, and with that, they started a great competition with the popularity of Twitter, which runs a live feed of news service-like tweets or posts from members whom users follow.
Since the U.S. presidential election of 2008, Facebook had become a robust platform for political movements. There were more than 1000 groups that both Democratic candidates and Republican candidates formed.
Then there were many official pages of many companies were created, and eventually, many high-profile people started using Facebook by creating pages. After the first day of the stock’s trading, Mark Zuckerberg’s holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion.
Fifteen years ago, on 15th July 2006, a podcasting company named Odeo, situated in San Francisco, released “Twttr.” It was later changed to Twitter. It is a short messaging service for users.
Odeo was initially started as a side project apart from the podcasting platform. This free application allowed the users to share short statuses with their friends or family by sending one text message to a single number (“40404”.). Within a few years, this free application eventually became Twitter from Twitter. No founders of this platform knew that this micro-blogging social network would become famous and become one of the globally leading social networking platforms.
Evan Williams is a co-founder of Twitter who isn’t as famous or talked about as a public figure as Jack Dorsey, another co-founder, and CEO of Twitter. Evan Williams made his name in the Silicon Balley by creating the Web diary-publishing site. He sold it to Google in 2003 in exchange for a few million US dollars. He was co-founder of Odeo, which was established in 2005.
This innovative idea also didn’t work and eventually fall, but Odeo’s leading service was made obsolete when Apple launched iTunes.
Evan took his 14 employees and built a team, and told them to brainstorm their innovative thoughts for a startup. Now, this is where a great engineer named Jack Dorsey came up with the idea of a server that allows users to share short personal status updates via SMS to groups of the users’ friends.
In 2006 they initiated their concept by launching a prototype named “Twttr.” Bird sounds inspired the name but was later modified. CEO of Twitter Jack sent the first-ever tweet on 21st March 2006, “just setting up my twttr.”
When Twitter was initially launched in 2006, it was still a side project of Odeo. According to a report in Business Insider, Evan Williams bought out the company’s investors. He then changed the name Odeo to Obvious Corporation and fired Glass, who happened to be played the most significant role in the birth of Twitter which didn’t become public until years later.
Six months after the launch, Twttr changed its name to Twitter. When the site went public, its founders decorated a 140-character limit for tweets based on the maximum length of text at the time. According to public demand, it was later expanded to 280 characters.
In March 2007, the users on Twitter exploded at the South by Southwest convention in Texas and Austin. The analyzers at the company counted that there were more than 60,000 tweets sent per day; it was just overgrowing. In 2013, according to a report in the New York Times, the company had more than 2,000 employees and more than 200 million active users worldwide.
In the same year, in November, the company went public, and it was valued at just over 31 billion US dollars.
Twitter’s user base is relatively smaller than Facebook. Facebook has more than 2 billion active users per month. But many people are recently following Twitter because of the authenticity of breaking news and information, especially for millennials and gen Z.
The company’s popularity has increased even more since the US presidential election in 2016. Former President Donald Trump started outspoken throughout the election campaign, and even after that, he was heavily active on Twitter.
Many politicians and high-profile people started being active on Twitter. Recently many young people are active on Twitter for information related to global politics and breaking news. CEO of Twitter Dorsey faced a lot of pressure to check the content on the site more closely and prevent hate speeches and harassment.
Let me talk about this particular social network before jumping into the origin, as many people are not entirely aware of it. People rarely talk about who created LinkedIn or how it began, like Facebook and Twitter. Unlike these social networks, which are used for social connections mostly, LinkedIn focuses on users’ professional contacts.
Users can create profile pages like Facebook, but it is different than that. It looks more like a CV or resume, and in that, users write their job experience, summarize their career, and educational history, and promote their particular skills. Users can form connections by sending an invitation to join her or their network or accepting invitations.
This social site has valuable features like helping users find jobs to further their careers and find connections at a particular company. The best thing about LinkedIn is that the membership is free, but you can get more features if you accept the premium service by paying a certain amount of money.
You can receive more profiles in your search results and see a complete profile on LinkedIn if you pay for the premium service.
Do you guys ever hear of Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant? You may have seen or heard their name once or twice. Reid Hoffman is a venture capitalist, Allen Blue is a product designer, Konstantine Guericke is a marketing professional, and Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant are engineers who are the founders of LinkedIn.
They launched the website in 2003, and initially, the growth was slow. In 2005, the breakthrough happened when LinkedIn introduced services that allowed companies to post job offers and search the network for prospective employees.
Other than this feature, LinkedIn allowed companies to promote on their site. It finally became profitable in 2007 when it had more than 15 million users on its site. Since then, it was increasing, and by 2011, LinkedIn had 100 million members globally. Its initial public offering raised $353 million in 2011.
LinkedIn sold its first shares on 19th May 2011 under the NYSE symbol “LNKD.” They sold per share at 45 US dollars. The shares of LinkedIn were rising as much as 171% on their first day of trade on the NYSE and closed at $94.25, which was far more than their IPO price (109%).
Let me tell you another way how LinkedIn multiplied. In 2011, this website earned around $154 million only from advertising revenue. Twitter in that year made advertising revenue of $139.5. So, LinkedIn surpassed Twitter in terms of advertising revenue. This company also had 2100 employees in 2011 whereas, in 2010, it only had 500.
LinkedIn leased 222-second street, which is a 26-story building under construction in San Francisco in April 2014. The reason behind leasing this building is to accommodate up to 2500 employees in this one building.
They started to move these employees in March 2016. There was an issue that occurred in 2016. The Russian government blocked LinkedIn for non-compliance issues. According to the reports, LinkedIn didn’t obey the 2015 national legislation, which requires social media networks to collect people’s data on servers situated in Russia.
In the same year, Microsoft also announced that they would buy LinkedIn for $196 per share. It meant they would have to spend a total of $26.2 billion, which is the largest acquisition made by Microsoft.
Microsoft allowed LinkedIn to keep its brand, freedom, and culture. Weiner would remain as CEO, who would then report everything to the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. The deal was made or completed on 8th December 2016.
Some of the best things happened to LinkedIn in 2017. 94% of B2B marketers had started using LinkedIn to distribute their content. Also, in the same year, this website’s new desktop version was introduced. In 2019, two years ago, LinkedIn updated its website and gave a feature to enable freelancers to be discovered on the platform.
So, you can understand above all the social networks; you need to be the most professional on LinkedIn. Last year Jeff Weiner stepped down as the CEO of LinkedIn after 11 years and Ryan Roslansky took the job of CEO of LinkedIn. He was the senior vice president of this company before becoming CEO.
I guess that’s pretty much the basic things you need to know about this excellent social network site.
How to use Social Networks Professionally?
Look, no one is telling you to maintain many things to remain professional on all social media platforms. Still, you have to balance being casual and professional on Twitter and Facebook and thoroughly experienced on LinkedIn.
Social media platforms have evolved drastically in recent years, so it became crucial for big and small businesses and professionals to become more connected. First of all, you need to figure out the purpose of your using social media.
- Staying up-to-date on the latest political news, ideas, and trends in your expertise.
- Establishing a solid and far-reaching network, specifically in your field of expertise.
Besides connecting with friends, seeing memes, and sharing them, you have to have these two general purposes if you want to be professional or semi-professional on social networks.
Other purposes like posting about your accomplishments to present yourself as a skilled and confident person towards people will see you on social network platforms. CPA, CGMA Director of forensic and litigation consulting at FTI Consulting,
Christopher Ekimoffonce said, “Social media is your chance to create a personal message for your niche and help drive your career in the direction you want.” It is a piece of excellent advice from a great leader, and you should give it a thought.
There are different ways you have to maintain professionalism depending on which platform you will use. Indeed, you do not necessarily have to be a complete professional on Facebook or Twitter, just like you have to be on LinkedIn. So, let us dive into these three different platforms.
How to use Facebook Professionally?
It is a no-brainer that LinkedIn comes to everyone’s mind when it comes to professional networking on social media. Facebook isn’t considered much because this site is treated more like connecting personally.
However, there are only 260 million monthly active users on LinkedIn, whereas Facebook’s monthly active users are around 2.41 billion.
This number tells you how you should use Facebook to build up your professional network. You don’t need to be thoroughly professional here; you have to balance being professional and personal.
Facebook’s initial purpose is to connect people personally all over the world. People love to see you for who you are, but it’s no harm in maintaining a balance. So, there is a right way of using Facebook as a professional networking tool, and now I will briefly talk about it.
If you are a student who is about to join a club in university or start a new job, you will be added with many club-mates and employees of your new organization. You have to be friendly toward these new people, and for that, you have to build a personal connection with them.
So, you see that personal and professional connection compliments each other. You have to understand their perception of politics, religion, and others aspects of life, and based on those; you have to talk to them. You have to crack jokes based on their taste in humor.
You have to send or share memes to make them laugh instead of making them hurt or offended. You have to do these similar things if you are an entrepreneur or a salesman.
People will likely buy goods from your company if they know you personally, and that is only possible by Facebook as all use it. Your conversation has to be based on your customers, colleagues, and club-mates. You can have conversations on sensitive topics too if both parties have mutual respect.
You can also set up a separate friend list to maintain the balance between your friends, family, and professional contacts. It will be a hassle to create another account to connect with your colleagues or expand professional connections.
Facebook lets you create several friend lists, which you can use to restrict the audience for a post to a particular group of people. You have to go to your “News feed”, scroll down, and click “Friend Lists” on the left. After that, you have to click “+ Create List” and name the list as “Professional” or “Colleagues”.
Connecting professionally doesn’t mean talking too much; it also has to be how you represent yourself on Facebook. In that case, your profile picture plays a significant role in establishing your image and credibility.
So, you should upload a professional or decent image. It doesn’t look good to upload selfies, especially washroom selfies. You have to take pictures with someone who knows how to take good pictures.
The same rule goes for the cover picture. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a picture of you wearing a suit, but it has to show a tidy appearance.
You have to fix your privacy settings if you want to maintain professionalism on Facebook. You have to change the privacy of your posts to “Public” from “Friends” so that you can promote yourself to outsiders.
If you are posting memes or pictures that you do not want to show to the public, then you can precisely change the privacy back to “Friends” on that post only.
You also have to change who can see photos you are tagged in to “Only me” so that your colleagues or professional contacts cannot see any embarrassing photos of yours. It will preserve your reputation as a serious business person or a person with an excellent corporate image.
This is an important one. You have liked and followed many pages on Facebook. Some pages or groups are probably for memes that can make your Facebook persona not look professional.
Also, there can be political discussion pages on Facebook that can lead to guessing that you support a specific political side that your professional contacts may not like.
So, it would help if you chose the option “Only visible to you” so that your professional contacts do not know which pages you are following. You also have to be careful which groups on Facebook you are joining.
You also have to restrict people from seeing whatever apps you use by selecting the “Only me” option. Trust me, and you surely do not want your professional connections, professor, or even club-mates to see the dating apps or weird farming games you have installed via Facebook.
You should join industry-related Facebook groups instead of joining groups that have sensitive content. There is an option on Facebook to click “Groups” in the menu on the left side of your News Feed.
You can type a term that is relevant to the field of your expertise. For example, I am majoring in Human Resource Management.
So, I will order something like “HR professionals” to join groups where there are lots of HR professionals, which is where I can build my network. When you join these groups, you have to engage in healthy conversations in the comments of various posts. This is the way you can connect with professional people.
You have to promote your professional image to maintain professionalism on Facebook. The most significant way to promote is to share your articles or blog posts related to business or your field of expertise. You can engage in healthy and friendly debates on Facebook with your friends and other professional contacts.
If you are an extrovert, you can live stream on Facebook to promote yourself and interact with people. These steps will make you look like someone worth knowing, which would help you successfully connect with others in your industry.
The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is trying to touch the territory of LinkedIn. It means that he is trying to make a part of Facebook a professional networking platform.
A feature can enable you to move your working information to sit right under your name and picture. This is the thing people in your industry will notice when they will visit your profile. So, you have to describe your job alongside the title of your job. You have to write it thoroughly to make an impression.
People go to meetings, workshops, and conferences to network in real life, but it is slightly different on Facebook. Many would suggest you instantly add a request on Facebook, but I would suggest you engage in a healthy conversation on posts and comment sections in most cases before sending a friend request. It will make a great impression.
In some cases, you have to follow them if they are too famous because they won’t accept your friend request. Let’s be real here. This way, you can still see their activities even if they do not receive your friend request.
Since you all have been using Facebook for a long time; it is better to review all the previous posts on your timeline and make some of the posts “private” that do not professionally represent you.
There is an option on Facebook called “Manage Posts”. Select this option and then select the posts you want to remove.
You can choose either “Hide posts” or “Delete posts”. You can also like “Remove tags” if someone tagged you in embarrassing pieces of stuff or shared an awkward photo of yours. This is important if you want to build a professional reputation on Facebook.
Creating a professional page is unnecessary, but it is another way of being experienced on Facebook. The page can professionally represent you, drawing the line between your professional and personal image.
Lastly, you need to understand the importance of URLs. For example, “facebook.com/jhvjh424ss” is one kind of URL that is the address of your profile. If you want to establish your professional brand or build a professional image, you have to keep your URL simple, such as “facebook.com/your name”.
How to use Twitter Professionally?
Twitter initially started by letting people share their instant ideas or situation. The purpose of Twitter has always been the instant connection and sharing of your opinions and thoughts. Twitter currently has 328 million users, and because of these users’ demands, they recently changed their prominent feature, which is the “140-character limit”.
They have increased the limit of the characters to 280, which offers more room to express your opinions and ideas. Before suggesting how to be professional on Twitter, I have to clear out a few things.
You need to understand the difference between DMs (direct messages), RT (retweets), and replies. Retweets share others’ blogs or tweets, and you can also comment on those tweets by choosing “quote tweet” instead of retweeting directly.
Replies are a public way to respond to tweets and engage in a conversation with anyone. DMs (direct messages) are privately having a conversation with someone. To have a private discussion, both parties have to follow each other, or one of the parties needs to go to settings and allow anyone to DM them.
One of the essential things for people in Bangladesh is to use Twitter efficiently to get their voices out to other parts of the world. They can engage with industry leaders and get the correct information and also make sure the right information is used while expressing ideas.
You have to understand this is one of the few accessible ways to control our global narrative by providing authentic information that can easily be fabricated on Facebook. You have to be formal and professional on Twitter and follow some of the steps mentioned above, but you cannot entirely use Twitter like you do Facebook.
First and foremost, you have to put your real name on Twitter and not add any words from fictional characters or players’ names. Twitter @name is also an important part. This is how people will find you. You have to use your real name here. For example, if your name is Rashed Mahmud, it will be better to use @Rashedmahmud.
Just like the suggestion I wrote above on Facebook, you have to use a picture wearing a suit in Twitter’s profile photo. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a picture where you are wearing a suit; you can use a semi-formal or any decent-looking picture, not a selfie.
There is another option on Twitter where you can upload a background picture just like the “Cover photo” option on Facebook. Twitter suggests its users use a photo of around 1500 x 500 pixels for the background photo. It is better to use a picture while you are working or anything decent which represents your professionalism.
You have to write a decent bio which is a feature of Twitter. Your business associates and other professional contacts would love to see how you represent yourself in this bio. You have to write it shortly and yet keep it elegant.
Twitter is the best way you be part of the global conversation that extends beyond your friends with who you are connected. You can learn more every day by following industry leaders and peers.
You should follow people who are part of successful start-ups if you are into venture capital. You can follow Brian Chesky, who is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb.
You can also follow Paul Graham, the co-founder of y combinator, the most successful start-up accelerator. You can find out about the early start-ups and follow these people.
Besides, you can also follow renowned people in the field of your expertise. It is better not to follow people with a bad reputation to preserve your professional reputation.
If you want to promote your business or brand, you have to tweet regularly, and those have to be relevant and elegant. In this country, people have problems with issues with the correct way of branding.
Use this platform, to talk about your business or start-up and promote it, and spread good information about it. Twitter allows you easy access to reach out to people you won’t find on other social networks.
This is the best to engage with people in your industry and build a relationship.
If you start tweeting about your idea, you’ll eventually start having a conversation in the comment section. You have to engage with them intelligently, and who knows?
Maybe that can lead to something in the future. You can also participate in popular hashtags or trends which are related to your field.
It takes a lot of time on Twitter to build professional networks. Generally, building a brand takes time. So, you have to be patient while engaging and promoting yourself on Twitter.
When you are replying and trying to have a conversation, be thoughtful and use your words efficiently not to waste your and your users’ time.
Your followers and other users can see your activities on Twitter and who are you following. So, it is better not to follow meme Twitter accounts and sensitive political tweeting accounts, which can harm your professional reputation. It is better to not even react to those memes or tweets. There is Reddit for it.
You should follow very few topics and center yourself on specialized topics instead of talking about other stuff that isn’t in your field. It won’t waste your time.
You have to follow good grammar and make sure the spellings are correct when you are tweeting about something. It is a small thing but still makes a good impression.
There are a few things you shouldn’t do on Twitter. For a country like Bangladesh, Twitter is not for consumer acquisition. It means your customer base does not exist on Twitter.
So, it is alright to talk about your company but do not waste too much time on it if your customers aren’t there to see it. It is also better not to tweet much because it will make other users think of you as “spammy”. It means they won’t read any of your tweets or be interested in engaging in a conversation.
Lastly, do not engage in unnecessary political arguments or any kinds of arguments. You can have those arguments on your private channel, but that too should be done decently with mutual respect. You should also provide a source if you are tweeting something which you get from somewhere else.
How to use LinkedIn Professionally?
LinkedIn is made for professional social networking, which should be used only for professional purposes. This social network has recently exploded, and right now, it has 528 million users, which is more than Twitter. People in Bangladesh do not know how to use LinkedIn properly even though they have accounts.
The majority of people know who are using LinkedIn. If you ask them, they’ll say entrepreneurs, people in Marketing, SCM and HR department, engineers, and full of business icons. But if you ask them, what they are doing on LinkedIn, many of them won’t answer.
Many people treat this site as job hunting. It indeed helps you find jobs, but LinkedIn will work best if you use it as a career management tool. There are around 3 million active job listings on LinkedIn at the moment.
When it comes to B2B, LinkedIn works better than Facebook and Twitter, but that also depends on the context. You need to specifically know the purpose of this social site before using it.
You have to use it differently than Facebook and Twitter if you want to boost your professional contacts. Here the rules or steps are stricter than on Facebook and Twitter.
First and foremost, you have to choose a professional photo, not even a semi-professional picture in this case. You have to upload a picture wearing a suit, shirt, and tie.
You have to smile at that picture which will give a confident vibe. It is better to take the picture by someone who is a professional photographer.
This is the first step toward a good impression on LinkedIn. Then, you can add a picture of your workplace or the banner of your company in the background image, which will promote yourself and your brand.
Just like your Facebook and Twitter bio, you have to summarize yourself here. LinkedIn provides you that option, but you have to be specific here as well as elegant while summarizing. You have to write about your personality too confidently but do not write anything outside of professionalism. You must mention your industry and location in your headline.
You have to strengthen your profile by adding your educational institutions, work experiences, and skills. Endorsements and recommendations are important parts of strengthening your profile. If you have work experience, you can request your former colleagues and boss to write a positive recommendation. LinkedIn allows you to request recommendations from your LinkedIn connections. Endorsement is the feature that can show where your expertise lies through your professional contacts. You can request your professional contacts, former colleagues or boss, or even coursemates with whom you worked on group projects to endorse you. It will help the recruiters to know how skilled you are. You also have to give recommendations and endorsements to them. This is how it works.
Your URL has to be your first and last name only. This is something I mentioned while writing about Facebook above. LinkedIn gives you the option to customize your URL. You will find it on the “Edit public profile and URL” option.
There are groups on LinkedIn where you can join and share your idea. It is ideal for engaging in a conversation before sending an invitation to connect with them. There are some rules in the group you have to follow, like not promoting your company. You can share your ideas and thoughts only.
You have to understand the approach and connect with people you already know, people you would like to know, and people you should know. You have to post your content and share your ideas on a post you will share. There is also an option of writing an article. You can briefly post a blog there. It has to be interesting so that people can find enthusiasm in reading those.
LinkedIn provides the platform to advertise your company or brand and generate sales leads. But I would recommend it as a Bangladeshi; it is wise not to invest in LinkedIn if you are a small entrepreneur or don’t have much budget.
Your majority of customers are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Like I said at the beginning, you should use it as a career management tool.
You can use it for job hunting, and you can see get benefits by using the premium version, but that’s $29.99/month. It is not wise to invest that much money to find a job on LinkedIn. You have to use it efficiently to build a network, and there is an option to search for jobs and let recruiters know that you are available.
If you can strengthen your profile as I suggested, it would be good to find a job.
“While in general, your network expands with the more connections you have, it’s not purely a numbers game. Keep in mind that relevant and quality connections hold a lot more value for your career than a total number of connections does.” – Jenna Rein, founder, and CEO of The Intern Hustle.
Remember, be picky about choosing recommendations, and do not connect with anyone easily. You have to see if you are going to be benefitted from it in the future. Do not hesitate to congratulate people on their promotion and work anniversary on LinkedIn. Who knows, it may bring something good to you in the future. And lastly, you should revise your profile monthly and update things if it is necessary.