LinkedIn Gets a Facelift

So, you’re just getting used to Facebook’s newest redesign. And now the news that LinkedIn is changing their design as well.

LinkedIn, the most “professional” of the online social networking platforms, now boasts over 50 million users but is often the forgotten stepchild of the social media movement. Our clients are often dumbfounded to hear us talk about LinkedIn in our social media discussions.

The new look: LinkedIn is rolling out a new navigation configuration to hopefully make the page look a little cleaner. The goals, according to LinkedIn, are:

1. A global navigation bar at the top of the page that provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services.
2. Simplified local navigation within each of the LinkedIn areas (Profile, Contacts, Groups, etc.).
3. More room available for page content. Less scrolling.
4. A cleaner, less-cluttered look.

Currently, much of the navigation runs down the left side of the page with the rest of it running across the top. In the new design, the lefthand nav bar is gone and the top nav bar is more comprehensive, with detailed drop-down menus. The result is a cleaner look and more room for content in the body of the page.

We think that a well-used LinkedIn profile (personal and company) can be very valuable for many companies. For example, we work with one company that is entirely industrial B2B. Facebook and Twitter – for their particular sector – isn’t their bread-and-butter, at least at this point. But their business is very relationship and referral-based. And they attend at least one very large industry trade show every year. LinkedIn is a perfect way for them to keep connected with old and new business contacts, the perfect way to follow-up after a meeting or trade show, the perfect way to keep fresh on the minds of decision-makers in their industry.

And that’s just for starters. The next step of LinkedIn is proactively using the platform to create connections via mutual contacts. This particular client probably won’t currently see much success through LinkedIn groups or discussions but that’s not to say that we won’t talk about how to find that success in the future.

The new LinkedIn redesign also hints at new features in the works. I’ll be very interested to see what those features are and how we can use them to help clients connect with colleagues, friends and sales prospects.

B2B? B2C? How do YOU use LinkedIn?