LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social networks in the world for business professionals. It is also one of the most effective for driving direct traffic to external websites. Over two years, Econsultancy in its article ‘LinkedIn Users are More Interested in Your Company: Stats’ demonstrated how LinkedIn had a 64% social referral rate to corporate homepages. This is compared to just 17% and 14% for Facebook and Twitter respectively.

If you want to benefit from results like this, you need to know how to make the most of what LinkedIn has to offer. In this article, we’re going to go through some of the best apps for power networking and marketing using LinkedIn the right way.

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1. SlideShare Presentations

Networking is about being able to produce a wealth of content, and every member of your audience will respond to something different. The SlideShare Presentations app for LinkedIn enables you to post SlideShare-style posts to your LinkedIn profile.

This will help you to present webinars and other presentations to your audience. It’s ideal whether you’re managing a company LinkedIn page or an individual chief executive’s page. It’s a great way to get people who are more likely to respond to visual and interactive content to engage with your brand or page more often. And engagement drives humanization, branding, and brand loyalty.

2. Company Buzz

Company Buzz helps you target specific employers, or your own company. It gathers the mentions of a brand name from Twitter and provides results highlighting current trends.

For example, let’s say that Coca-Cola has just launched its new summer marketing campaign. Company Buzz would tell us how many results it had aggregated for mentions of the campaign on Twitter.

LinkedIn promotes this app for a reason. In the research paper ‘LinkedIn Best Practices Targeted Status Updates’ it stated that 6 out of 10 LinkedIn users actively search for industry insights. Follow the trends and you’re bound to get the attention of a significant portion of your network.

3. Resume Builder

The Resume Builder app automatically turns your LinkedIn profile it into a professional resume, allowing you to choose from a number of templates. It’s been praised as one of the most useful apps available on LinkedIn, quickly gaining 19,000 users in its first months of release.

An effective way of using Resume Builder is to check if your profile is complete. The importance of an up-to-date and complete profile, is detailed the article, ‘The Lazy Man’s Guide to Managing Social Media Profiles.’ If you find any gaps on the resume you produce, you’ll know where you have more information that needs to be completed on your profile.

4. InMaps





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InMaps offers a visual view of your network. If you have a big network, it can be difficult to imagine all the different clusters of users you have. InMaps solves that problem; if you want to spot trends in the users you have connected with, this is the app to do it with.

The only problem is those with huge networks will have to wait for a new development. When your network crosses a certain size threshold, the app stops working. There’s currently no word on when an update might be in place to increase the limit, but the majority of users should have no problems.

5. Swarm

If you want to identify new trends in your industry, you can do it with Swarm. Swarm shows a visual cloud of the various search terms people are using on LinkedIn. Terms could include a major news event or a simple keyword.

If you’re looking to use keywords in your profile, or find out what’s hot right now, this is the app to do it with.

6. LinkedIn Mobile

Finally, everyone who accesses social media on the go should have the LinkedIn Mobile app, which allows you to do everything you would on a laptop or desktop computer from your phone. This allows you to update your LinkedIn profile, add connections, and stay on top of news and trends within your network whether you’re at a conference, on vacation, or just on the way home from work.

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If you’re looking for more ideas on how to use LinkedIn for marketing, see my article, The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Marketing.

What are your favorite LinkedIn apps? Let me know in the comments below.