Genuine Juice

One day after Twitter’s 5th birthday, LinkedIn announces that it passed the 100 million member mark. I couldn’t get over the timing – even when announcing this major milestone, this “other” social network still ended up one step behind the hype parades of the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Another “100″ number jumped out at me from LinkedIn’s recent posts trumpeting this milestone: 100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn. That said, the thing that most impresses me about LinkedIn isn’t its user growth, it’s the number of features that the company has launched and added over the past year or so. While working with a client in the finance sector, we’ve become very in tune with the social media guidelines put forth by FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). Since FINRA’s guidelines were announced in January 2010, LinkedIn has released more than 25 significant new features, plugins or enhancements. While most are not earth-shattering or summon the “Oh my God they tweaked my profile page!” reaction that even the most subtle Facebook tweaks often generate, they have a substantial collective impact on LinkedIn’s user experience.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the improvements over the past 14 months:

• LinkedIn Today
• BlackBerry and Android Apps
• Follow companies
• Groups: Reply to group threads via email; Top influencers in groups
• LinkedIn Skills

So why does this matter? Each new release presents new opportunities and challenges for our clients to engage with an audience. For some, that comes in the way of recruiting; for others, that comes in the form of enhanced dialogue in groups; and for still others, it means finding new ways to curate content and extend their thought leadership within the communities they care most about.

Of course, there are areas where LinkedIn could continue to expand its reach (for example, integrating Groups with Wibyia’s toolbar). Nonetheless, if you haven’t been that involved with LinkedIn lately, now might be a good time to see if there are new opportunities for it to fit into your company’s social media strategy.

How have you used LinkedIn in the past year? What would you like LinkedIn to do for you in the coming year? Let us know in the comments or contact us directly.