LinkedIn is becoming one of my favorite social networking sites. It’s a great way to keep up with your professional networks — with the launch of LinkedIn Today, the site is also becoming an efficient way of finding great content.

Given that LinkedIn is geared towards professionals, it makes sense to use the site to show off your previous work. By this, I mean any published articles you wrote, journal articles you worked on, interviews where you were featured, etc.

Recently, a Facebook friend asked me for some advice on how to best show off his work on LinkedIn. Here are three ideas I came up with:

1. Use the “Publications” feature.

A relatively recent addition to the LinkedIn profile, the “Publications” feature is probably the most straightforward way of showing off your work on the site.  It’s quite easy to do this:

1. Log in to LinkedIn.
2. Click “Profile”. This should automatically direct you to edit mode.
3. Scroll down and click “Add a publication”.
4. Fill out the next page — you need at least a title, but everything else is optional. Make sure you fill out the URL, if you have one.

Once you’re done, you’ll see the “Publications” section of profile just below your experience.

2. Install applications.

LinkedIn has some cool applications that you can add to provide even richer content on your profile. One way to show off your great work is to put it in your blog and then share it to everyone. For example, the WordPress application on LinkedIn will display your latest posts on your profile.

If you’d like to take this further, you can also choose to put it in a PowerPoint presentation then upload it on Slideshare. On LinkedIn, install the Slideshare app to display the presentation on your profile.

Installing an application on LinkedIn is pretty easy: go to your profile (edit mode), then click “Add an application”. You can also go directly to the LinkedIn Applications page.

3. Post the link as update.

The easiest way of sharing your wonderful work on LinkedIn is to post it as a status update and include a link. The link will appear at the top of your profile until you change your status. The one disadvantage of doing this is that your update will eventually be archieved if you post subsequent updates.

My recommendation is to use all of these three in some way. For example, I might add a publication on my profile and also post it as an update.

Any thoughts on this topic? How do you show off your work on LinkedIn?

Photo: Socialmediamx (Flickr)

© 2011, KC Claveria. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please link back to kcclaveria.com