Twitter + LinkedIn | Professional Networking via Social Media

First let’s assume that you don’t know what LinkedIn is or what a developer community is and in a few sentences solve that problem and then we will be able to discuss the Benefits, Challenges, and Alternatives that LinkedIn presents to developers. 

LinkedIn is a 50 million strong businesses orientated social network and commercial website that offers individuals the opportunity to ‘network’ on their network. The people using LinkedIn are people who are looking to sell something, their products, skills and experience. 

A developer community is a lot of things to a lot of people, but generally it is a group of people who come together to develop, improve or indeed promote a computer application.  

The most popular developer communities are Linux or Firefox ones, normally a developer community grows because the application software is open source and they can improve it and thereby make the user’s experience a better one. 

Oh and of course API is an acronym for Application Programming.  

With LinkedIn API, the main concept of the developer community is to offer users of the site the opportunity to bring a LinkedIn network to their own website and in turn improve the visitor experience to your own site. 

There are a number of extremely useful benefits to anyone wishing to use the LinkedIn API and that is that you will enhance the user experience of your website and that means that your site is bound to keep visitors on it not only for longer but these visitors have a real reason to return to your site time and again and that is a very valuable and attractive proposition. 

By using the LinkedIn API you will also be able to take advantage of the fact that your site is getting exposure on the LinkedIn page that they will build on your site. 

Another advantage of using a LinkedIn API is that you can show your Twitter tweets on your LinkedIn page and see updates from Twitter as they are written. 

The disadvantages of LinkedIn API are that just can’t create an application that will ‘blast’ or broadcast to your network with just one click of your mouse. The amount of information available on LinkedIn API from the site is small, indeed there were only 120 discussions active and compare that with a typical developer community for Linux of at least ten times tat amount and you can see that out of the 50 million users of LinkedIn only a very, very small proportion of people use it. 

One final problem related to the LinkedIn API is not really a software issue or indeed any form of mechanical issue and that problem is that LinkedIn is really regarded by most as a social network for ‘professional, where as MySpace or Facebook are regarded as Social networks for young trendy people. 

So if you are using a social network to market a product then unless it is suits, paperclips or something that would appeal to ‘professionals’ you wouldn’t use LinkedIn in the first place your marketing effort would be concentrated on Facebook or MySpace and it is probably for that reason that the good people at LinkedIn have made the site so easy to use to market your products by opening up and offering LinkedIn API’s.

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