Guide to LinkedIn Website Plugins

Countless sites take advantage of Twitter and Facebook widgets, allowing their latest Tweets and Page Updates to be instantly pulled into their websites, or users to like their page, but very few take advantage of LinkedIn's collection of plugins.

LinkedIn's plugins are of particular interest if you're in a B2B market, but can be of benefit for other sectors as well. They offer a quick and easy way of underlining your professional credentials; showing that your business or individual team members are credible, well-connected and knowledgeable.

Use of LinkedIn continues to grow rapidly, with over 380 million members at last count and 2 new ones joining up every second. It's clear that it's now an important platform where many prospective customers will research you and your team. So, how can you take advantage of their plugins and which ones are most suitable?

The most simple plugin that you can use, and one that Facebook pages use to great effect, is the 'Follow Company' plugin - this will generate a follow button (and optionally display your number of followers) that will allow LinkedIn users to quickly follow your company on LinkedIn. It's a great alternative to a Facebook follow button as not everybody uses Facebook, or wants to follow work-related news on what is often consider a more personal space. The next two plugins that are likely to be most useful include the 'Member Profile' plugin and the 'Company Profile' plugin - these allow you to pull in snippets of personal or company profiles, complete with photos/logos and profile/follow buttons. It can be a great way to boost the likelihood of a visitor clicking through to LinkedIn for more details, as opposed to the more common small icons.

There are other plugins, including one which can display all the jobs currently available at your company, but this will only be useful if you use LinkedIn as one of your recruitment platforms.

It goes without saying that the better your LinkedIn profiles, the more effective these plugins will be - the more connections, endorsements and recommendations your company or team profiles have, the more credible and impressive the message to your prospects will appear.

Visit https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins to create your plugins.