Experimenting with LinkedIn Answers

Lately I’ve been experimenting with LinkedIn Answers, a section of LinkedIn for asking and answering business questions (no selling, advertising, recruiting or job searching allowed). So far, I’ve answered 22 questions on a variety of topics. Nine of those answers have been tagged as “good” by the person who asked the question, and two more have been labelled as the “best answer” among the responses. So, I’m batting .500 overall with a couple of home runs.

Right there is a little bit of the magic of LinkedIn Answers. People provide thanks and confirmation that you’ve helped them through the rating system. Many also write a personal note of thanks or follow up the conversation via email. It feels good to know you’ve helped someone, and that encourages more participation in the system (at least it does for me).

It’s fun and productive to help people. It’s also interesting to learn about the challenges facing other organizations around the world. Through this process I’ve chatted with folks from all over the US, Canada, India, Singapore, the U.K., British Columbia, and Japan about topics ranging from Non-profit management to Internet marketing to tips on using LinkedIn.

I’m still feeling my way around this part of LinkedIn, but I can tell you that it is very active. It’s also very interesting how the system seems to prioritize the questions you see based on your network. Those more closely linked to you seem to float to the top. It also learns what sort of questions you like to answer and encourages you to go deeper in those areas.

This sort of personalization feels very natural. And once you’re in that flow, you end up helping a lot of people and keeping a finger on the pulse of the challenges people face in your area of expertise. A couple of nice by-products are the many opportunities to expand your network and show off your expertise a bit, which helps enrich your profile (more on that in another post).

LinkedIn Answers is well worth exploring. Go check it out.

Photo credit: coletivomambembe

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