The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21494
Get LinkedIn’s New iPhone App to Grow Your Professional Network by Bill Caraher, CIO at von Briesen & Roper M any people love using LinkedIn from their desktops. But if you’ve ever tried to use the LinkedIn website from your smartphone’s mobile browser, you know it’s a challenge, to say the least. If you have an iPhone, you can download the free LinkedIn app, which helps aid access. Incidentally, for those of you with BlackBerry or Android smartphones, there are LinkedIn apps for those phones as well. While they are not covered here, I’ve included some links below with more information. The first generation of the LinkedIn app for iPhone was fairly useless and lacked even the basic features found on the full website. Fast-forward a year and take a look at the recently updated LinkedIn v3.3 for the iPhone: It is feature-rich and very useful. The app layout has nine icons on the “home” screen, which is down from a busy and redundant twelve icons in its previous release. The icons include: Updates (network activity), Inbox, Buzz (Twitter search), Connections, Reconnect (people you may know), Invitations (people who have sent you invitations to connect), Recents (profiles you’ve looked at or searches you’ve done), In Person (bump to connect) and Themes. 100 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer EXPLORING THE LINKEDIN APP The “Updates” feature allows you to scroll back through your timeline and see the activity of your connections and your network. All the names and links are clickable, and profile photos in the timeline help you remember old faces or stop and take notice of people consistently providing good content. You can use the “Buzz” feature to search Twitter’s real-time feed for mentions of your current or past companies and any other keyword search term you designate. Buzz is really helpful if you’ve never used Twitter or don’t have an account on that platform (though you really should). “Reconnect” is a nice feature if you want to see people you might know. Unlike the full LinkedIn website, the iPhone app doesn’t reveal how you are linked to the recommended person, but rather only shows your degree of separation. The “In Person,” or bump feature, is nice in theory, but there are stiff limitations that might make it easier to just exchange a business card: Both users must have the LinkedIn app for iPhone, Bluetooth must be enabled, the “In Person” feature must be on and activated at the same time, and you