Last week I attended the CIPR Social Summer ‘LinkedIn Special’ talk presented by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications (who I’ve had the pleasure of working with in a past life). Wadds (as he likes to be known) made plenty of great points, but here are three key ‘takeaways’ that got my attention: 
1) LinkedIn is very indexable which means its pages come up high on search engine listings and are great for SEO. If there are specialist search terms you or your company want to rank highly for, make sure you complete your LinkedIn profile and pay close attention to the appropriate keywords.
2) Closely related to point 1) is the fact that LinkedIn has a great internal search facility. Lots of business people mine the site to get information and find suppliers, partners, staff etc and Wadds explained that he has used this to his advantage to get more conference speaking opportunities. If you type “PR conference speaker” into the LinkedIn search box, you’ll see he comes up as the first result. And this strategy is obviously working – he seems to be speaking everywhere these days!
3) The LinkedIn site includes a great application to help publicise and manage events you or your organisation may be running. As you can see from the CIPR Social Summer’s own LinkedIn event pages, the networking site offers a neat way for people to register for events and broadcast to their own LinkedIn contacts that they’re attending. It’s also perfect if you want to network at an event and need to quickly see who’s coming and check out their profiles before you go.
For more info, check out Wadds’ presentation on SlideShare here.
Photo Credit: Mariosundar