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LinkedIn now has over 120 million users worldwide, including six million in the UK. Two new members join every second and there are nearly one million groups on the site.

It is now the mainstream tool for professionals to network online – and that is why it can’t be ignored as a marketing tool.

An increasing number of businesses are promoting their brands through staff profiles and presence on LinkedIn.

However, making the most of the social media website is a science- as with all social media websites information and security are key issues.

Here are some hot tips on how you can market your business successfully through Linkedin:

• Tell a compelling and authentic story about who you are, how you got to where you are, what you do and why you enjoy it. It is critical that a profile is “personally professional”. Individual profiles that only talk about the company or brand are a big turn off. Encourage your staff to take the same approach.
• Join relevant discussion groups and get involved in them. This can be interesting and rewarding and helps to raise your company’s profile.
• Make sure that your profile and all employees’ profiles link directly to your company page. An individual’s profile should also include information about your company, its products and offerings.
• Ensure you have a comprehensive company page including detailed pages on all products and services.
• Ask for and publish recommendations from satisfied customers for your products and services section on your company page.
• Ensure staff have profiles that are 100 per cent complete. LinkedIn is not like Facebook – individuals are representing a company or brand in a professional capacity on LinkedIn. The more visible your staff are on this network, the greater the visibility of your brand. But this only works if your employees are actively using their LinkedIn account.
• Encourage employees to use blogs, PowerPoint presentations and videos promoting your brand in their profiles and help them with the material.
• Provide guidelines on how to effectively communicate, reminding staff that their activities are representing the company- and can be read my literally millions of people- including your competitors.
• Provide all staff with copy to use to describe your company within their profiles. This ensures a consistent approach and helps avoid disclosing commercially sensitive information to competitors.
• Start your own group to build a community where you can indirectly promote your brand.
• Remember that search engine optimisation is important for every article, profle and group. LinkedIn allows open profiles which means that the search negine will alos pick up on your activities.

Twitter’s UK audience jumped by a third in May 2011 following the Ryan Giggs super injunction leaks, which drove a huge number of female pensioners to the site.As a result of the Ryan Giggs super injunction row social media company Twitter enjoyed its highest ever UK audience last month, with 6.1 million British people visiting the site, up 34 per cent on April’s figures, says Nielsen-UKOM, a UK online measurement company.

Twitter’s monthly audience boost was helped by a 65 per cent increase in the number of over 50s men, aged between 50 to 64, accessing the site, and a doubling in the number of female pensioners (the over 65’s) going to Twitter.com to see the latest in the super-injunction row.

Both LinkedIn and Facebook also enjoyed record audience figures last month, also driven by a surge in their popularity amongst the over 50s age group.

During May 2011, 26.8 million Britons visited Facebook, which is the highest ever audience figure the social network has attracted in the UK, propelling it for the first time above MSN, Microsoft’s news and email hub, making it the second most popular site in the country behind Google.

According to the Nielsen-UKOM figures, LinkedIn registered 3.6 million visits during May 2011, up 57 per cent on the same month last year.

Two years ago in the UK the profile of Facebook’s audience was skewed towards 18 to 34 year olds. However, the number of 50 to 64 year olds visiting the site has grown 84 per cent in the last 24 months.

While the number of UK visitors to the three biggest social networks continues to rise, the amount of time these audiences are spending on these sites is more mixed.

The average visitor to Facebook and LinkedIn is spending a little longer on those sites each month than they were two years ago, while the average visitor to Twitter appears to be spending a little less.

LinkedIn is likely to be the biggest floatation of a technology company since the technology market bubble of 2000.The site’s projected value has jumped 30% ahead of its much hyped initial public offering (IPO) share flotation today.

The company said it expected shares to sell for between £25-£27 ($42-$45) , giving the business networking site an overall price tag of around £2.6 billion.

Industry watchers said it could pave the way for other social sites, including Facebook, to go public. Eager traders and their clients are also eyeing up sites such as Groupon, Twitter and Zynga.

However, there is one in particular that they are desperate to splash the cash on.

The big question is whether or not LinkedIn can justify the share price hike especially after the company revealed in the risk factors section of its prospectus that it does not expect to be profitable in 2011.

“Our philosophy is to continue to invest for future growth, and as a result we do not expect to be profitable on a GAAP basis in 2011,” the filing said, referring to generally accepted accounting principles.

Some investors believe the asking price is over hyped given that it values LinkedIn at almost 17 times its 2010 revenue of over £ 150 million ($243m).

Facebook which is six times the size of LinkedIn with more than 600m users, is expected to go public in 2012.

The world’s biggest social network is valued at 32 times estimated 2010 sales, according to Nyppex, a private share market.

By comparison Google’s shares trade at about six times its revenue.

While some question the site’s proposed share price, other analysts credit the company with good judgement when it comes to the timing of its IPO.

The attention that the LinkedIn IPO has received has inflamed talk of a technoligy bubble reminiscent to that of the late 1990′s and the dot com boom when prices for tech stocks were over inflated leading to an implosion of the sector.

In a recent report by SecondMarket, an exchange for private shares, investors expressed the most interest in Facebook, followed by Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn.

One note of caution for the sector came in the shape of Renren, dubbed the Chinese Facebook, which went public earlier this month only to see its shares drop below the IPO price.

The French networking site Viadeo, a chief rival of LinkedIn’s, earlier this week said it would put plans to go public on hold for now.

You can track LinkedIn’s progress as they begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol LNKD.

LinkedIn- the professional social network, has reached over 100 million members worldwide, adding a new member every second of each day, it claims.
The site, which aims to facilitate professional networking in the digital space, has been adding roughly one million new members every 12 days- the equivalent of one new member joining every second.

In December 2010, the site had attracted five million plus members in the UK and 20 million in Europe.

LinkedIn launched in 2003 and started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman.

It took 494 days to sign up the first million members. More than half of its members are now located outside of the US.

Two weeks ago LinkedIn launched a personalised news service in a bid to attract more of its users to the site with greater frequency.

LinkedIn Today aggregates news from around the web, serving up a range of stories based on a user’s professional interests and the articles which have proved popular amongst a user’s friends.

Stories are ordered based on how many people in a user’s LinkedIn network tweeted or shared them.

There is also a dropdown box which on LinkedIn Today which allows users to personalise the story by industry.

Analysts believe the site is trying to boost its traffic and user engagement rate and subsequently its advertising revenues, ahead of its expected IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the US stock market.

Although LinkedIn’s membership numbers have reached a new high, many people do not visit the site or look at their profiles every day in the way that they do with other networking sites, such as Facebook.

Last week a new study found that the majority of FTSE 100 companies have failed to fully embrace social media sites, such as LinkedIn, and risk being overtaken digitally by smaller and more agile firms.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has criticised social networking sites, such as Facebook, for limiting the web’s openness, ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the first webpage.
Writing an article on the Scientific American journal, entitled Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee sought to remind people of the power of the open and democratic web.

He said: “The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.”

However, he went onto say that the web’s democratic nature and universality was being threatened by some of its “most successful inhabitants” of late.

He specifically criticised Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, for limiting the flowing of the freely available information across the web.

“Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your email address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph,” he writes.

“The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site.”

“Each site is a silo, walled off from the others.”

“Yes, your site’s pages are on the web, but your data are not. You can access a web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.”

Facebook is coming under increasing pressure to open up access to its social graph, arguably its most powerful asset. The site’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, resisted these calls at the Web 2.0 Summit, refusing to commit to a date when Facebook would open up its data set to the rest of the web.

Earlier this month Google banned Facebook, and other companies, from extracting Gmail user data, unless they make their own data available to Google. Facebook has so far refused to cooperate.

Berners-Lee, in his piece, also warned against cable companies which may also prevent information flowing freely on the web.

He writes: “Cable television companies that sell internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment.”

New research has found that almost three out of five respondents currently used social media as a communications tool in their daily jobs – up 22% on last year.

A further 17% said that, while they did not employ social media techniques regularly, they were interested in doing so.

But 22.4% pointed out that, although they would like to understand the medium more, they found it difficult to unearth genuine ‘experts’ in the field to help them.

Just under a quarter of marcoms professionals are currently denied access to social networking sites by their IT departments, down from 46% last year, the study showed, which makes campaign execution and monitoring impossible for them.

Among those that are in a position to undertake such monitoring, however, by far the most popular online tool was Google Alerts, which is free (45.5% of those questioned). Some 37% undertake ad hoc monitoring in-house, while Radian 6 is the most popular paid-for tool (14.3%).

Twitter, meanwhile, is the social network of choice, with 61% of respondents saying that they use it regularly as a means of distributing new stories, up from 28% last year.

But about half of those questioned were unsure where ultimate responsibility for social media communications should reside, indicating that it was currently spread between a range of disciplines. Some 23% thought it should be handled by PR staff and 11% by digital experts.

Interestingly, however, about three out of ten respondents also believed there were simply too many social networks around these days, while about 12% thought that they were becoming too commercial.

As more marketing and communications professionals use social media channels for UK brands, new research by McCann Erickson shows that many agencies and consultants are not providing enough guidance to help their clients with social media.Almost half of those surveyed (48%) said they still don’t feel they have adequate knowledge on how best to use social media channels effectively for marketing purposes.

Although this is down by over 16% from 64% last year the figure is still surprisingly high.

Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.4%) admitted that advances in social media are difficult to keep up with and almost the same proportion (22.4%) said they would like to understand social media more but that it is not easy to find genuine ‘experts’ in the field.

Interestingly, in just 12 months since the last survey there has been a marked increase in general social media usage for communications activities.

On average, usage for each of the main social networks (facebook, twitter and LinkedIn) is up by around 22% from last year. Twitter has shown the most increased usage (+28.2% since 2009) with 61% of those surveyed now saying that Twitter is regularly used as a way of distributing news stories.

It seems that IT departments are now more willing to let their marketing teams have access to social networks at work.

Last year’s results showed that 46% of respondents were unable to get access at work and although this figure has come down to 24.3% it still shows that nearly a quarter of UK marketers and communications practitioners are not granted workplace access to social networks, making monitoring and campaign execution impossible.

Social media monitoring for brands is now a key area for marketers who need to demonstrate effectiveness of activity, ROI and target audience usage of social networks. By far the most popular way of brand monitoring online is through Google Alerts with 45.5% using this free tool.

Radian 6 has emerged as the most widely used paid-for tool with 14.3% usage followed by PR Newswire’s monitoring tool Social Media Metrics at 10.4%. 11% of those surveyed said they relied on their retained PR agency to monitor social media brand activity and 37% said they conducted ‘ad hoc’ monitoring in house.

Asked where they think the responsibility for social media communications should reside, 50% said it came under a combination of disciplines; 23% said it was best managed by public relations professionals and 11% said it should sit with digital experts.

Additional results at a glance:
• 59.8% respondents said that social media communications is now part of their day jobs
• 29% think there are now too many social media networks
• 12.1% think social media networks are becoming too commercial
• 16.8% said they are interested in using social media more within their daily role but do not
currently use it

Dr Search reviewed the research from: McCann Erickson Social Media Index 2010