Over the past decade, LinkedIn has become an essential personal branding tool. It has never been more important to build and maintain a stellar LinkedIn profile.

The virtual professional network has morphed from an online resume and networking site to a comprehensive personal branding resource. While it may not boast Facebook or Twitter-like numbers, LinkedIn is still the most popular and largest professional network/business-oriented social networking site out there. As of now, more than 3 million companies from all around the world have official LinkedIn Company Pages. Which means that working professionals, employees, entrepreneurs, CEO’s and job-seekers alike need to have an active presence on the website. For the reasons being :

LinkedIn is great for creating strong connections, especially between professionals, like-minded individuals, thought-leaders and people in your industry or whom you share interests with.

With over 225 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network.

Today, it’s assumed that you have a LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have one, can you be taken seriously as a career-minded executive? Brand-conscious leaders don’t turn their backs on two hundred million prospects. It is very important to be in touch with people in your industry or niche and build strong, long-lasting connections with them, and LinkedIn lets you do just that.

Also, When someone googles you, your LinkedIn profile will likely show up in the first or second spot – that’s some powerful Google juice! This is important because, according to a Gravitate Online study of over 8 million clicks, more than 94% of users clicked on the first page results while fewer than 6% clicked to the second page. The first and second positions get 50% of all clicks. So if you have a LinkedIn page for yourself, chances are that if you were to Google your name, your LinkedIn page will be one of the first results on the results page.

Different kinds of people use LinkedIn for different reasons to find you. LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to control what they discover about your strengths and, more important, about your brand. Who are these people? People you know. People who want to know you. People who matter: Your prospects, employees, manager, clients, competitors.

At the end of the day, LinkedIn is just another social networking website – which means people share stuff on it. When you connect with your peers and colleagues, you gain knowledge, information and insights about what’s happening in your industry. You remain updated and in touch with everything that’s happening in your niche. You remain on top of all important events and whatever goes on that’s relevant to you.

So LinkedIn is an excellent way of keeping abreast of what’s happening in the industry, especially about things that are relevant to you.