10 Pros and Cons of LinkedIn for Professional Profile — Honest Pros and Cons

5 min readMar 19, 2020

The internet has become a considerable help for job searching if you’re looking to get into the manpower. It has also become a great place for companies to put out their job postings and have them available to a larger number of people. However, most job searching websites are rather impersonal. Let’s get introduced to a website called LinkedIn that combines a job application portal with the social network.

Pros and Cons of LinkedIn

What exactly is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a social network designed for businesses and work professionals. Individuals can build a profile and connect with contacts who can endorse their skills. Companies can also create profiles to advertise and post job openings that individual users can apply for.

History of LinkedIn

In 2002, Reid Hoffman, a Stanford University, graduate, recruited a team of old colleagues from Social net and Paypal to work on a new idea, a social networking site for professionals. Six months later, LinkedIn is both with big goals but a pretty slow start.

In the beginning, sometimes it would only get 20 users a day and they were trying to answer the question “How do we get a million viewers into this platform? “. So 2003 was a year dedicated to viral growth and they actually started achieving this once they added uploading your address book.

The following year they started groups and started working with American Express to help network small businesses.

Advantages and Disadvantages of LinkedIn

Today one in every three professionals has a LinkedIn profile and two new people sign up for Linkedin every second. Why is the hype of it so crazy? Let’s learn the key advantages of it.

1. Networking Opportunity

LinkedIn is an incredible tool that provides business holders with the ability to research potential clients for a business. LinkedIn creates powerful networking opportunities for specific businesses by making industry posts accessible for research, establishing credibility with possibilities and strong search technology for corporations or individuals to narrow down alternatives.

LinkedIn organizes content from across LinkedIn and classifies it into pertinent businesses to keep you updated on upcoming trends or great ideas in the news. LinkedIn enables you to associate your accounts and blogs to share experiences and advice on subjects that are significant in your business or industry.

LinkedIn gives information about potential employee candidates by enabling you to view professional profiles of the individuals you may be seeking. For example, if you are in the IT industry and are actively seeking a new computer engineer, you can view profiles of individuals with relevant experience by doing keyword searches. Most individuals keep their profiles up to date with their most recent experience, and the profile can act as a virtual resume. This gives the company a widespread idea of a person’s previous background and skillset to compare to the job description.

4. Search Engine Friendly

Web search tools today search for esteem. Once in a while, this is found in the content. On different occasions, it is found by how regularly content is imparted to other people. With LinkedIn, experts find the opportunity to hit both of these key focuses. They can make content that is straightforwardly shared on the social stage, which would then be worthy to be shared as an article interface on other social sites like Facebook or Twitter. This implies the most urgent bits of data have expanded web presence and this can prompt better by and large transformation rates.

5. Cost-effective

For people that are on a restricted budget, LinkedIn for Business offers a basic account without charge which will facilitate to make an expert identity. It permits folks to make a network that they trust likewise. Free accounts are even allowed to request up to five introductions at just the once and obtain weekly alerts on saved searches. even though you would like a premium account, the value will be but $600 annually

Cons of LinkedIn

1. Spam Connections

Not each message you receive once on this social platform goes to be helpful. After you begin using LinkedIn for Business to advance your own cause, you’ll notice others are getting to do an equivalent with you. Not solely should you filter all of this spam, that takes time, however you’ve additionally ought to confirm that your own valuable experience isn’t being deleted by others as a result of it being seen as spam in addition.

2. Investment of Initial Time

Not every business professional is active on LinkedIn. It will take time for connections to create and conversations to get started. You’ll spend a lot of your initial time with introductions as you work on building connections. This method is often tedious and generally even unsuccessful. Premium accounts will limit the time investment, however, that additionally means that creating a financial investment that some little business homeowners or people won’t be able to create.

3. Posting Rules are Confusing Sometimes

LinkedIn’s moderators sometimes takedown posts while not telling you an excessive amount of concerning why they were taken down. It’s not a common occurrence. However, once it will happen, it’s hugely irritating. After all, if you don’t recognize why they took down a post, you won’t recognize what to alter in it. You’ll simply get to keep tweaking it and reposting till it gets through them once more.

4. Privacy Concerns

Many data-heavy companies get hacked for user-data. That’s one of the vital threats that users put themselves into when enrolling for social network platforms like Linkedin. To entirely embrace Linkedin, the user has to disclose a lot of sensitive personal and professional information such as date of birth, employment history, contact information, email address, etc.

If Linkedin servers’ security was ever to get compromised, the users will be at risk of identity theft.

5. The Premium Can be Costly

A business premium record on Linkedin can hinder you, in any event, $600 (selective of expenses) every year. What’s more, that as well in the event that you pay the yearly sum forthright. Paying month to month would be about $60 (selective of assessments) — however that is an extra $120 every year (restrictive of charges).

Conclusions

The upsides and downsides of LinkedIn for Business show that it tends to be an exceptionally advantageous development and outreach process. It can likewise assist with improving transformation rates, discover great representatives, and normally increase sales over the long haul. In case you’re hoping to network outside of a business reason, in any case, you may find that different platforms, for example, Facebook and Twitter, will give better systems networking opportunities.

References:

(Last Updated On: April 10, 2020)