How Business Owners Can Benefit From LinkedIn’s Features, this week’s featured guest post, by Carol Tice, Make a Living Writing blog.

LinkedIn is a highly useful social-media site for business owners looking to connect with prospective customers, suppliers, partners, or other businesses in their town. If you haven’t already built a profile on LinkedIn, I recommend it. Get on, fully flesh out your profile, and start connecting with people you already know.

LinkedIn has a reputation as a social-media channel with a very businesslike “flavor,” and that’s one of the reasons I like it. People aren’t on there to talk about what their dog ate this morning…they’re there to grow their business.

LinkedIn offers many ways for you to make new connections. Each connection you make connects you to all of that person’s connections indirectly.

Once you’re on, you’ll get invitations to connect. There are different schools of thought about how to respond — some people only connect to people they know well, while others accept anyone who asks. I guess I’m somewhere in between: unless they’re really spammy or not remotely someone who would ever be a prospective client or good referrer for my business, I usually approve friend requests to keep my network growing.

Some of the features I like best on LI (in no particular order): Read More→