I recently came across The 2013 LinkedIn Marketing Guide. It is a well written article highlighting recent changes made to their platform for both professionals and companies.

My own experience, having worked on Social Media strategy for some time, is that LinkedIn is an excellent tool for brand exposure for companies. It provides excellent opportunities to promote your personal and business brand to communities and contacts. However, in the areas of customer engagement and driving traffic to your site it does a fair job, Facebook and Twitter are better channels.

My pet peeve with new LinkedIn experience is regarding skills & expertise section.

Once you are popped with an above dialog, just like a typical product install, the chances are that you will click the above button without much bother to edit or delete what you are endorsing. So for someone to later on see all your endorsements, it is really what LinkedIn thinks about you and not what your professional contacts think about you. For LinkedIn, it may work as a great search and find tool but in my opinion, erodes the value of skill and expertise section.

The following dialog presents another related issue.

And problem here is much worse. The choice offered around topmost core skill still needs refinement. Knowing all the four guys closely, I feel it is a wrong choice to offer.  It is so easy to press “endorse all 4” button leading to bump in non-core skills.

Overall it is good to see LinkedIn improve their platform to play an important role in SoMe space. Much work is still left.