When you meet new people in a professional setting and you want to make sure you can stay in touch with that person, you usually go online to search for that person’s profile in some social network sites, right? So which one do you use to connect with this person? Facebook might be too personal, there are far too many photos that either we, or our friends and family, have uploaded on Facebook that we shudder to think that our professional acquaintances could see them. Following that person on Twitter could be an option, however it might not be relevant because not everyone uses Twitter for professional purposes. For me, it’s very simple. I just go to LinkedIn, search that person’s name, send a request and voila! That person enters my online professional network.

LinkedIn has indeed answered the needs of professionals like us who want to easily (and effectively) maintain an online presence solely for professional purposes and build network. Millions of people are using it as their online CV, and LinkedIn has a wide arrays of features that we can use, not just to stay in touch with ex colleagues from previous jobs, but also to help us find suitable candidates to fill in job positions in our companies, to look for jobs for ourselves, find opportunities with professionals around the world, look for sources (if you’re a journalist), and many more. With 161 million users globally and 4,2 billion professional-oriented searches that those members did in 2011, the possibilities are endless!

In Indonesia, LinkedIn members have surpassed the 1 million mark in February 2012. I noticed that ever since LinkedIn is available in Bahasa Indonesia, I have been getting more and more requests from fellow Indonesians on the site. And this is great, of course! I personally think Indonesians should not spend the majority of their time online on Facebook and instead, start using services like LinkedIn to develop their career and business even further.

Anyway, not surprisingly, traffic to LinkedIn via mobile devices has been growing tremendously for the past year. In fact, 22% of LinkedIn traffic actually comes from mobile devices and it is the fastest growing platform in the company. Every second, 19 people successfully do a search via mobile devices and 41 LinkedIn profiles are viewed through mobile devices. Apparently, LinkedIn members love using iPads because it has been the fastest growing device in Linked In, which have seen a 250% rise from 2011 to 2012.

Photo credit: cnet.com

If you’re one of those people who access LinkedIn from your mobile gadgets, especially those who use iOS devices, you’ll love LinkedIn iPad and iPhone apps. It’s not just another application, I’ve been using LinkedIn iPhone app for a few months and I gotta say, sometimes I prefer to access the service using the application rather than on my laptop. It’s so sleek and easy to navigate! I also tested the iPad app a few weeks ago and it’s even better. It has the same beautiful user interface (UI) as the iPhone version, where you can see your profile, your contacts’ updates, inbox easily but there’s more to it. My favorite feature of LinkedIn iPad app is the Calendar sync. With this function, your calendar will be displayed and you can quickly look up the profile a person you’re about to have a meeting with, see what they’ve been up to, what projects they’re working on or used to work on and this will give you some ideas on what to expect from the meeting. I find this to be extremely useful because I’ve been in that situation once too many, where I’m going to have a meeting with someone I’ve never met before and don’t have a lot of time to find the info I need about that person to prepare myself for the meeting. So this slick integration is brilliant!

Anyway, my LinkedIn account has been upgraded to Executive recently, which means there are even more useful features I could maximize. I’m not done playing around with these new features but I will definitely share to you my experience once I’ve spent enough time on it. In the meantime, I’d like to know what you think of LinkedIn.

Do you have a LinkedIn account? What do you mostly use it for? Please share and feel free to add me to your professional network if you’re interested to find out more about my business! :)