LinkedIn: Advantages, Growth, And Common Mistakes In Knowledge Discovery And Data Mining Essay.

Growth and Projected Growth of LinkedIn

Discuss about the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

The main aim of this study is to prepare a career goal by setting up your LinkedIn profile ready for networking. The assignment firmly focuses on analyzing the brief history of LinkedIn profile including its growth and project growth. Advantages of using LinkedIn profile for the current career stage also discusses with examples.

LinkedIn is a social networking service, which is business and employment oriented, and it operates via the website. LinkedIn have more than 467 million accounts and it allows the workers and employee to create profile and contact each other for building a strong professional relationship in social media. The users are able to invite anyone for getting connected and build trust with the service users (Walker, 2014). The main cause of popularity of LinkedIn is the unique strategy and acquisition by Microsoft and integration of LinkedIn with the office product suite and help better integration for the professional workers.

LinkedIn was founded in 28 December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003. The growth of the LinkedIn was slow and most of its revenue comes from the selling the information to the recruiters and the sales professionals. LinkedIn faced many legal issues for automatically sending invitation to the email address without any permission.

The members of LinkedIn increased and the growth rate is increasing at two new members per second. The projected growth rate is expected and the implementation of the security technology would make it a strong contender in the social media network. External third party application has been added with LinkedIn that helps benefits the site to build a second-degree connection and search more specifically the users connected (Linkedin.com, 2017). The third-party application can also help the user to find job according to the profile and recommend suggestion for new friends regarding the professional career chosen by the user. Different company profiles can be followed by the user for finding vacancy in the company and apply for jobs. The photo of the user can be posted for quick verification or identification of the user. Social greetings and messages can be posted to congratulate other users and see the visitors of the profile page.

On consideration of the advantages that associating with experts on LinkedIn brings, understudies can never disregard this long range informal communication stage. Organizing and creating an account on LinkedIn ought to start as ahead of schedule as could reasonably be expected (Russell, 2013). LinkedIn can help the understudy to discover employments when they move on from school.

Advantages of using LinkedIn

However, college students spend very little time on this professional social networking platform, as compared to the time spent on other popular social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Some of the advantages of using LinkedIn that a student can get benefit are as follows:

Getting email alert regarding the job: A profile of the student is required to be created on the LinkedIn that would help the user to get email notification and alerts for recommended jobs. The created profile should be based on the resume and the choice of industry or job preferred by the student (Crant, 2015). The jobseeker or the student can see notification of the homepage as they log in into the LinkedIn account.

Connecting with the professionals who have already created their account: There are large numbers of professionals who have LinkedIn accounts and they can be sent invitation for chatting and get more knowledge about their industry. The co-workers, colleagues and classmates can also be connected from the LinkedIn platform and the email list of the user can also be imported for finding out the LinkedIn users and communicating with them.

Conducting research on company: It is the biggest benefit of LinkedIn that the job seeker can search company pages the targeted employers. The student can visit different company pages for conducting a research on the company and prepared himself or herself for the hiring process (Utz, 2016). Researching on the company would help the jobseeker to be in front of the competitive position and increase the chances of employment.

Many people and business are not using LinkedIn and face trouble in using the site and the reasons are as follows:

It is laborious and users find it hard to use: The user interface of LinkedIn is not user-friendly when compared with Facebook. The people who want to publish media and article for promotion of their business page finds it easy to use Facebook, whereas LinkedIn is time consuming and there are lots of hidden things that annoys the user (Huston, 2013). The user needs to filter the content for meaningfully curate the content that he sees.

The account is inundated with spam’s and useless update: There are some users that use LinkedIn unethically for spamming others. The content feed option of LinkedIn is filled with poorly written post and unnecessary connection updates that are not useful for the users. There are lots of promotion content and filler that are posted by the user which is not useful to anyone.

Reason of Not Using LinkedIn

The user sometimes unintentionally gets multiple profiles: A close attention is required to be paid when operating the LinkedIn account and lack of attention can cause creation of multiple LinkedIn account (Xia, Guha & Muthukrishnan, 2016). If the user has multiple user email id it can be linked with the LinkedIn account and the users finds it difficult to delete the duplicate profile created by mistake.

The issues cannot be solved faster as the expectation of the users: There is a long list of complaint for the LinkedIn site but the problem is not solved fast enough. The help desk option of the LinkedIn profile takes more time to respond and the use faced by the user is not solved immediately and it solved there is no guarantee that the answer would make sense.

The three common mistakes that the people makes while developing their profile are as follows:

Waiting for development of the account unit the person is unemployed: if any person is looking for a job, LinkedIn account can be useful but some people are afraid of creating their profile. The people have the perception that creation of a Linked In account would make the colleagues or co-workers to think that the person is intended to leave the job (Kim, Kim & Nam, 2014). But in reality, it takes time to build a good profile and network and the best time to develop the profile is when the person is employed. The person can contact with the existing connections and can send more connection request for building a good profile for searching a new job.

Using the right keyword: the recruiter and the hiring manager use the search function of the LinkedIn for finding the most appropriate candidate suited for the company. The keywords must be present on the LinkedIn profile for highlighting the account and list the profile when the hiring company searches using those keywords.

Using fake information on the profile: A few people think about whether they can "fudge" certain points of interest on their LinkedIn profile — whether it is a past position or degree they never had, an aptitude that they truly don't have, or a reference they never met. With LinkedIn, everything is recorded and associated (Zide, Elman & Shahani-Denning, 2014). Selection representatives or contracting directors utilize LinkedIn to contact potential references regardless of the possibility that the client does not give them, to check whether the individual worked at an organization he lists on his profile. If the user lists a skill on the profile, then he might be questioned about the skill.

Common Mistakes People Make Developing Their Profile

The three advices provided for the LinkedIn users to best advantage the LinkedIn account are as follows:

Addition of a good profile picture: LinkedIn is different from the other social media sites and the only one photo should be posted for the profile picture. It should be noted that Facebook is used for sharing pictures and Linked is used for sharing the professional identity of the user (Wu et al., 2014). The photo posted should be professional looking because an unflattering picture imposes negative effect on the profile and the network activity.

Not sending connection request to everyone: The LinkedIn network of the user must be expanded and for this, the user should not send request blindly to anyone who has least interest. If the user tries to send large amount of connection request the account may be suspended or deleted (Agarwal et al., 2014). If the request is sent to an unknown person an introduction should be used that explains the motivation of the connection request. If most of the people chose the option “I don’t Know this person”, then the account of the user may get blocked.  

Updating the profile at a regular interval of time: Bad impression may be created if the profile is not updated for years or putting no status on the profile. LinkedIn is not designed for updating the profile constantly but it needs to be updated according to the profile of the student. The position of the student is needed to be added and if any working experience is, available it should be added (Quinton & Wilson, 2016). If the student has any honorable area or any unique achievement, it can also be added to the LinkedIn profile. The status update function can be used for letting people know about the professional goals and objectives of the student and relevant information must be shared. The activity can be shown by commenting on the status of the people and participating in LinkedIn groups.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it is identified that LinkedIn is a commonly used and very much effective social network for the people for career growth. Using LinkedIn profile, people can able to get job alert in their specified field. In addition, people can able to get in touch with the high-profile businessman or people to get advice from them. However, it has been analyzed that for greater career growth, people have to update their resume on regular basis and send connection request to other needed.

References

Agarwal, D., Ghosh, S., Wei, K. & You, S., 2014, August. Budget pacing for targeted online advertisements at LinkedIn. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 1613-1619). ACM.

Businessinsider.in (2016). LinkedIn's user growth: slow but steady. Retrieved at 25th January, 2017 from: https://www.businessinsider.in/LinkedIns-user-growth-slow-but-steady/articleshow/52735101.cms

Crant, J., 2015. Linkedin secrets that showcase your value. Strategic Finance, 96(7), p.19.

Huston, M., 2013. Get Social: Build Your Career With Facebook? Yes, Really. It may seem like an oxymoron to consider using Facebook as a way to build your career, but an increasing number of professionals are using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn to create primary learning communities (PLCs). A PLC is a group of people with similar interests or skills working toward a common goal. The ASHA Leader, 18(11), pp.online-only.

Kim, D., Kim, J.H. & Nam, Y., 2014. How does industry use social networking sites? An analysis of corporate dialogic uses of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, & LinkedIn by industry type. Quality & Quantity, 48(5), pp.2605-2614.

Linkedin.com. (2017). Sign Up | LinkedIn. Retrieved at 24th January, 2017 from: Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/start/join

Quinton, S. & Wilson, D., 2016. Tensions & ties in social media networks: Towards a model of underst&ing business relationship development & business performance enhancement through the use of LinkedIn. Industrial Marketing Management, 54, pp.15-24.

Russell, M.A., 2013. Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, GitHub, & More. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".

Utz, S., 2016. Is LinkedIn making you more successful? The informational benefits derived from public social media. new media & society, 18(11), pp.2685-2702.

Walker, S., 2014. Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Strategy Advice & Tips for Business Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram & Much More!. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Wu, L., Shah, S., Choi, S., Tiwari, M. & Posse, C., 2014, October. The Browsemaps: Collaborative Filtering at LinkedIn. In RSWeb@ RecSys.

Xia, C., Guha, S. & Muthukrishnan, S., 2016. How much is your attention worth? analysis of prices in linkedin advertising network. NetEcon.

Zide, J., Elman, B. & Shahani-Denning, C., 2014. LinkedIn & recruitment: How profiles differ across occupations. Employee Relations, 36(5), pp.583-604.