Why use LinkedIn

This is more of a recollection of my learnings than anything else, people can share their learnings and I promise to grow this space.

1. Targeted resume submissions – Find the organization you want to apply to, go find folks in your network who work for  that organization. Use their referrals to get your resume the place you want it to be.
2. Business Visibility – Professionals talking about their organizations can act as evangelists on LinkedIn. With the integration of Twitter, the value of LinkedIn as a Social Media Platform has increased a thousandfold.
3. Peer learning – People who work in the same industry can collaborate to discuss and resolve each other’s problems. Whereas this seems to be a generic utility of a community, I have seen this happen pretty well through the Q&A forum of LinkedIn. Since people who contribute to these are serious minded professionals vis-a-vis the casual replies of Orkut. All this for free unlike Experts-exchange, where the user has to fork out good money to get to the solution.
4. Showcasing – This is the most obvious one, do I need to get into this :-)

Your comments are more than welcome on this one, since it will only add to this post.