LinkedIn is already one of the best forms of social media for improving your business, with the ability to find and engage with new customers and sell your services and products online. However, a new service launched by the site will make this even easier and it is quickly becoming a popular feature amongst business users.
ProFinder wasn’t launched with a huge fanfare, but it hasn’t taken long for the benefits of this new service to be seen. The structure has been based on other sites where businesses can search for professionals specialising in a specific area, such as finance or marketing, and using the search function it can quickly highlight the most suitable contacts for your next freelance project.
Quick and effective searches
The extensive profiles on LinkedIn provide a wealth of information that is fully searchable, so simply typing your keywords into ProFinder will bring up the best results, allowing you to quickly source the right freelance expertise. If you want to search more efficiently, you can also filter the results according to who is in your network, where they’re located, the recommendations they’ve received and a number of other factors.
Currently, the ProFinder service is free for LinkedIn users, including both vendors and customers, but there could eventually be some form of fee for using it. This might be a fee to appear higher up in searches for particular categories, or a percentage of the financial transactions that take place between the parties could be taken out.
There are advantages to using this service for businesses compared to other freelance sites, as you will find a more trustworthy and higher skilled professional, due to the additional credibility that is gained from being on LinkedIn. It also benefits individuals who have an efficient means of generating warm leads that can work in conjunction with other marketing efforts.
This new service shows that LinkedIn is developing its offering and moving away from being purely a way to find a new employee or post a job to become an extensive online marketplace that adds more value for its ever growing membership.
