0 LinkedIn Becomes More Interactive

With 70 million users, LinkedIn has been lacking in its interactive sharing capacities, at least for a social networking site it has. While it has always been fairly easy for you to let your connections know what you are working on, it hasn’t been very easy to truly share information. The good news? LinkedIn has realized that and is rolling out several features to not only make sharing easier, but to increase the ease and usability.

LinkedIn has taken a few pages right out of the Facebook and Twitter’s books with some of the new interactive features for everything from its Group Forums to the look of profiles.  LinkedIn will be rolling out the updated features live throughout this week.

Conversation Editing Capabilities – Have you ever been typing a response in a group discussion and after posting it you notice you’ve made a typo? This can be extremely embarrassing, but it won’t be as big of an issue anymore. You will now be able to preview, edit and delete your conversations.

Group Activity Tracking – Now you have the ability to view all of your activity history for all of your specific groups.  

The “Like” and “Pass” buttons – It’s back! In the Groups area you will be able to “like” a discussion. Not only that, you can “Pass” on a discussion. Facebook, why haven’t you given us this button yet?

Follow – The new follow button makes it simple for you to follow discussions and people. Like what a certain person had to say? Click “Follow” below their picture to keep up to date on their contributions across groups that you share.  

Top Influencers – If you are interested in learning who the industry leaders are for specific groups, you won’t have to wonder anymore. The new Top Influencer’s feature shows you which professionals are the most active in that Group.

Privacy of Updates - LinkedIn has rolled out another feature to help you target your communications. You can now specify who can see your updates. You can let everyone, only your connections, or only specific people or groups see specify updates.


Re-Sharing - This is similar to the retweet feature on Twitter. Now you can conveniently share content someone else posted.


Tiny Urls - In the land of 140 characters the shortened url is king.  LinkedIn is now making shortened lnkd.in urls available to accommodate the 140 quota.  


Profile Picture – Social networking is all about the sense of community, so why should a professional networking site be any different? If you’re anything like me you’re a visual person. Names don’t stick, but faces do. LinkedIn has made it easy for all the visual people by adding the professionals picture to their LinkedIn activity creating more of a community and shedding the hundreds of faceless name links.

Jobs Tab – If you’re not in the market for a new job then the endless stream of job posts that appear in the discussion areas of your Groups can easily become very annoying. LinkedIn has created a jobs specific tab within its Group area to separate it from the actual discussion. The best part?  LinkedIn also included a handy Jobs tab on the discussion tool bar to flag any ill placed postings.

These changes all bring LinkedIn into a new level of social community to further foster interaction and conversation. Way to go LinkedIn.

What is your favorite new LinkedIn feature?