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Not a day goes by when we don’t see Twitter and Facebook as being talked about as essential social networks for bloggers to be investing time into – but over the last few months I’ve been investing a little extra time into another social network – one that I wonder if some have forgotten about a little – LinkedIn.

I’ve long had a LinkedIn Account (I’d love to connect with you there) but I’ve not really known what to do with it for a long time – but lately I’m seeing more and more opportunities in the network. Let me quickly mention a few:

1. Companies

In the last week I set ProBlogger up as a ‘Company’ on LinkedIn. I always knew you could do this but didn’t see the point, that was until I saw that you could also add your company’s products on LinkedIn. I’ve now set up all of the ProBlogger eBooks (and the hard cover ProBlogger book) as products on Linked In.

The cool thing about it is that you can also seek recommendations for those products from your LinkedIn network which helps to build social proof for your products. For example check out the ’31 Days to Build a Better Blog’ recommendations that have already come in.

2. Groups

Start a ‘group’ on your blog’s topic – it can open up opportunity for you to become a leader and authority in the niche and opens up some interesting networking opportunities (join the ProBlogger Group here).

3. LinkedIn Today

I’m still in the process of exploring this more but LinkedIn have recently set up LinkedIn Today which aggregates the most news from around LinkedIn (and Twitter). It breaks it down into categories and lets those who view it share and save what they’re reading. I’ve been using LinkedIn Today as something of a news reader lately but today whenTechCrunch announced that LinkedIn have become their 2nd largest source of social media traffic (bigger than Twitter) it struck me that there are opportunities for publishers to generate traffic from it. Getting aggregated involves putting a LinkedIn Share button on your site and you’ll probably need to be on a topic that is relevant – but it could be worth exploring (more details on how to do it here).

4. Finding Guest Writers

One of my most successful experiments on LinkedIn has been in identifying people to write guest posts for my photography site. The search features on LinkedIn help you to hunt down people on topics of expertise and to send them emails – I’ve gone on hunts for a variety of photographers over the last few months and sent them messages to see if they’d consider writing a guest post for me (or to consider being interviewed) and it has landed me some great posts.

5. Status Updates

Lastly there’s the common status update feature that most of us are familiar with – similar to Facebook and Twitter. There are all kinds of opportunities here to share links to your posts, to share links to other sites, to ask questions and generate discussion etc.

Looking to Learn how to use LinkedIn Better?

Just as I was about to hit publish on this post I noticed that Lewis Howes (MR LinkedIN) has a special running on his amazing product – LinkedInfluence at $97 for his 4 Module teaching series on how to use LinkedIn effectively.

If you’re looking to increase your LinkedIn features I’d commend Lewis and his teaching to you.