Most people are familiar with the concept and layouts of  Facebook and twitter, LinkedIn however remains a mystery to most people. LinkedIn has a reputation for being a Social Media site for professionals but this reputation is old fashioned, today LinkedIn is  a legitimate business tool use by a wide variety of people and probably best described as  a social network for business opportunities. On LinkedIn, people don’t chat about music or what they did on Saturday night, but instead focus on opportunities and how the network can help you. And that’s a winning formula. Here are just some of the most common and productive uses of LinkedIn.

So, give us your attention please as Social Traffic Espionage  reveals 8 ways to you can use LinkedIn.  

1. Connect With and Find People.
By now you know that Social Media is all about developing relationships. LinkedIn is no different, it’s a great place to look for old friends, old business colleagues, former employers or employees. Simply do a LinkedIn search and you might be surprised who you know. Remember part of the way you develop relationships with people is by helping them. So don’t miss out on this great opportunity. You can use LinkedIn to promote others, link to with others, recommend other LinkedIn members and of course answer their questions.

2. Boost Your Business
What do all business’s want? Customers of course. So if you are a small or large business you want to generate more customers. LinkedIn can put connect you with those people who are interested in your products. It can increase your chances of hitting that big deal that puts your business exactly where you want to be.

3. Research Companies and Business’s
If you are looking for a specific business, wanting to discover business trends, find an expert in your field, or need to contact people for further information then LinkedIn is a great place to start. Using LinkedIn’s advanced search option you can quickly connected with the information you seek. Take the unknown out of a job interview by looking up the person interviewing you. Checking the LinkedIn profile of the person who will be interviewing you will give you some important information about their work experience, interests, education and more.

4. Get Free Publicity
LinkedIn can be used to generate publicity not only for your business but when you launch a new product. At times it can be difficult to contact media or top bloggers. But many of them have a LinkedIn profile, and you can contact them through the profile. You can get FREE targeted Social Media Traffic for your business by sending them a press release or a quick email letting them know about your business or product launch.

5. Find Your Dream Job
OK you have a job, but it’s not really what you want. LinkedIn can help! Join LinkedIn, put yourself out there, search for companies that are looking for people to fill the jobs that you are interested in and contact them. To assist in promoting yourself to potential employers create a LinkedIn profile that serves as a resume, use a vanity url for this and then send people the URL. Your dream job could be just one click away.

6. Check Out Potential Employees References
If you are going through the interview process you want to make sure you have all the information possible at your fingertips. You can find out additional information about an applicant by using LinkedIn to search for others who worked at the same company at the same time. This way you are able to do a thorough background check in seconds.

7. Get Advice.
Questions, questions we all have them. You can find answers to most of your business questions in LinkedIn. Simply ask a question using LinkedIn’s Answers feature and get some great answers. There are some great experts on LinkedIn, willing to answer your queries.

8. Brand Yourself
Your aim in business, should be to develop a brand. It doesn’t matter what your area of expertise is, you need to develop your own personal brand. You want people to know instantly who you are, and what you do when they hear your name? A strong presence on LinkedIn reinforces your brand. Make sure you include a link to your website from your profile.

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OK  we all know that;  I mean how could we not! You would have to be living on a deserted island under a rock with no access to the Internet, newspapers or radio to not know something about twitter.  Everybody knows that Barack Obama used it during his election campaign

As twitter continues to expand at a phenomenal rate, the million dollar question that is on the lips of business owners is “Can Twitter be used to build businesses”  The answer is  YES!  Switched on businesses  are already using twitter as a terrific business building tool.  These  businesses know that twitter is a FREE,   no-cost way of marketing,  but best of all its is viral. 

So how do these businesses  use twitter?  Its all in the posting (tweets).  Twitter provides a public forum, and each post (tweet) a business makes becomes a form of promotion as other users, follow the businesses  posts(tweets).  Over a period of  time these tweets build a reputation for the business as  people can visit and look at your Web site and the quality of your content. The business becomes part of the community.  But wait theres more,   business owners  can also use Twitter for market research and to keep an eye on customer service issues.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says businesses “that are not quite big enough to make an impact on the Web, or to spend resources there,” have been some of the earliest users of twitter.  Some San Francisco-based coffee shops and bakeries have sent tweets to tell their customers about specials or products they may be out of that day.  “Businesses use this as a hybrid between marketing and customer service,” says Stone. “They use the Twitter Search to track mentions of their products and services and as a way to begin a conversation.”

To summarize, twitter can be used by businesses to;
1.  build a reputation and brand
2.  market products
3.  achieve  viral marketing 
4.  conduct market research
5.  monitor customer service
6.  develop relationships with other  twitterites
7.  participate in the twitter community

Twitter seems Terrific for  building businesses doesn’t it?  But hang on a minute, before you rush off and start using it today, its worth noting that like any online forum, Twitter may not be for everyone. It can be a time waster and for some people addictive. Having said that if you own a business its definitely worth a look and even a try before you decide whether twitter is terrific for building your business.

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Myspace, a type of social network is extremely hot right now.  It gets millions of visitors to its site each day (maybe that’s why it’s always loading so slowly?) and it is one of the most visited websites in the world (number one most visited website in the United States).

When I first joined myspace I was really surprised to see how many people were marketing their services on there. It ranged from:

 Singers
 Actors
 Models
 Small business owners
 Comedians
 Filmmakers

The main theme about myspace is to add friends and that is displayed in your profile. The reason why marketers want friends is so that they will have a range of people that they can market to; it is sort of like an email list in a sense.

Myspace was originally built for the younger audience but you can see that it’s obviously changing very quickly because a lot of the older audiences roam around there. The concept with the “friends” theme is very similar to high-school so you have to step outside your normal business frame of mind and work on fitting in.

Ask yourself what do they want? It’s quite simple; all they want is to feel accepted and to have friends. They are not on there to market their products; they just want to accumulate as many friends as possible and to feel good about themselves. Why do you think people post pictures and ask for comments? They want to feel good about themselves; it makes them feel more confident and happy which people would gladly pay lots of money for but you will be giving it to them for free. Why do you think Americans spend millions
of dollars each year on cosmetic surgery? Do they really need it? Of course not, but they want the attention of their peers and surroundings. So, make sure to leave comments for your friends. Be a super cool, but a super helpful friend.  You shouldn’t go on myspace for the sole purpose of making money, put some thought into it first. Myspace is a business in itself, and you should spend some time to build this effectively, nothing a software program can do by itself, it needs the human touch.

Myspace is a great place to learn about the “sociological” aspects of human beings. I learn a new thing every-time I go there. I like to use myspace to gather feedback and understand humans better because they are in a different state of mind on there. It is like my own scientific laboratory in a sense. 

You have to play by their rules to make a sale, and it’s usually harder to sale on myspace because people are just not in the buying mode but I will reveal some solid marketing techniques later. Myspace is a powerful network and it is hard for someone to compete with it because of the large amount of users.

You can add more features to a social network and try to make it than Myspace, but I doubt that you will overcome myspace, the same can be said about the other powerful social networks such as eBay. You can try to make something better by adding more features and  reducing the price but being the first is something that people will always remember.

So, if you can’t beat something what is your next route? You join them, so this is what we are about to do and this is exactly what a lot of other social networks have done and they used myspace as a fuel to drive on. An example of a social network that used myspace to fuel their burning growth is youtube http://www.youtube.com/. In matter of fact, the growth of youtube was so rampant that it actually threaten myspace own video resources and they wanted to disable myspace users from using the network on myspace, but the users loved youtube so much so youtube has became an exponentially growing phenomenal since. So, the next question is how can you become the next youtube and use myspace to fuel your next product launch?

Well, there are some ways that you can go about doing this and I will get to them later.

Just by integrating your business around myspace you can:

 Build a rapport with prospective customers
 Generate more traffic to your website
 Build up your newsletter
 Network with people that have similar goals with you
 Use it as another free source for advertising

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