Visually Exploring Your Network

LinkedIn have a impressive feature that allows you to visualise your professional network to help you see the relationships between you and your connections. Check out LinkedIn Maps to create your own.

Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to cluster groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, school mates, or networking groups you’ve been part of. In my map, my Sputnik Agency collegues are blue, while my friends connected through the Social Melbourne network are orange and another employer Revium are green.

It's evident that people who work together are all inter-related and interesting to see how a few people I know also seem to know others in seperate network groups, this can be explained by the fact Ive worked in Melbourne most of my life within the technology industry.


What does your own map look like?

Using LinkedIn to promote your personal brand

With the number of Australians now using LinkedIn surpassing 2 million this year, the social platform LinkedIn has become more than just networking for professionals, it’s become the business to business (b2b) marketplace for many Australian companies and the recruitment ground for both HR agencies and companies head hunting talent.

Last week at the Social Media Club Melbourne, Cliff Rosenberg the Managing Director of LinkedIn Australia & New Zealand gave a presentation to a very packed room on the new LinkedIn Signal tool which works a little like twitter in the sense of being your very own personalised news service. Signal aggregates comments from everyone on LinkedIn who's in your professional network, the companies you follow and industry groups you have joined.



Described as your personal business intelligence dashboard, Signal allows you to access the most relevant insights from the constant stream of status updates and news from your connections. Conversely, it can also be used to put your business at the centre of conversation with your customer and promote your products and services informally using a viral word of mouth approach.

LinkedIn Signal offers 8 filters to modify your stream. To see what people are tweeting or sharing on a particular topic you can narrow or expand your view of the stream based on the following filters: Network, Industry, Company, Time published, Geo / Region, School or keywords and hash tags such as #SMCMelb.

As a way to get your business into your customer’s Signal stream you should actively participate in LinkedIn groups and respond to relevant requests for LinkedIn Answers. Additionally you should also regularly update your LinkedIn status. This activity will also increase your visibility on LinkedIn by ensuring you appear more often on your connections’ home page feeds and Linkedin Signal.

Like any social network, you need to be proactive and consistent in your efforts to make LinkedIn work for your business and personal brand. Some tips to help nurture your business relationships include: sharing relevant content via status updates and sending contacts individual messages when appropriate. Note: By integrating your Twitter account with LinkedIn, Tweets that contain #in will automatically be posted to your LinkedIn account.

This blog orginally appeared on Revium's blog