BranchOut Vs LinkedIn
The corporate world is becoming fiercely competitive with every passing day, making it essential for present day employees and employers to expand their business network and keep their eyes and ears open for viable job, career and recruiting opportunities.
With the growing popularity of social media networking, websites like LinkedIn.com and BranchOut.com have become important tools for career networking.
Since its launch in July 2010, BranchOut.com has been an important topic of discussion as a career networking website, especially due to its similarity to the older player LinkedIn.com. There have been several conflicting views about which one is more useful. Speculations about whether or not BranchOut will score higher than LinkedIn are doing the rounds.
Let’s take a look of both of them one by one –
LinkedIn.com: Launched on May 2003, LinkedIn is probably one of the oldest and most popular websites for building one’s professional network online. It provides individuals from all over the world a free platform to put together their professional identity and showcase their skills set, work experience and business connections – colleagues, co-workers, classmates, employers, clients and partners etc. It is believed that more than 100 million professionals from all over the world use LinkedIn including independent professionals, business owners and recruiters.
• Once you create your profile on LinkedIn, you can grow your network by searching for your past and present colleagues, college mates and friends and send them requests to join your professional network on LinkedIn.
• Additionally, you can discover inside connections to companies when you are looking for a job or setting up a new business. As a recruiter, you can do a “People” search and add promising candidates to your network.
• Another interesting feature that LinkedIn offers is the ability to become a part of a group. Industry Groups are great for connecting with experts in your industry and moving a step closer to achieving your goals. You can ask questions and in turn, get valuable answers and advice – a true example of genuine knowledge sharing.
• By requesting your colleagues, clients, and bosses for recommendations you can make your profile even more powerful.
• What’s more, LinkedIn offers businesses the ability to have their own Company Page, another useful tool for connecting with your customers & clients and building meaningful relationships with them on a regular basis.
• Besides your own status updates, you can view updates from all your connections.
• For those interested in advertising, you can advertise on LinkedIn using its Direct Ads feature and target people based on their location, industry or job titles.
LinkedIn is a great tool for those of you who want to manage your career growth as well as find and share opportunities. You can consider your LinkedIn profile to be your formal, professional space on the web and can track who viewed your profile and other related statistics.
BranchOut.com: Launched in July 2010, BranchOut is Facebook’s new career network application. In order to use BranchOut service, you must have a Facebook account. Once you sign up for the application, you can either enter your own career summary or simply import all your professional data from your LinkedIn profile.
• The good point about BranchOut is that it keeps your professional information separate from your personal interactions on Facebook.
• Hence, you can connect with other Facebook users for professional networking & career growth. To do this, you can share BranchOut app with your friends and gain access to their professional data (as well as friends-of-friends). Your professional network can grow across hundreds and thousands of companies once you connect with friends and hundreds and thousands of their friends!
• In addition, you can also search for a company name and see a list of all those people who work there currently and have worked there in the past.
• Using the job search feature, you can browse through over 3 million job listings based on criteria such as location, position, company name or any other keyword. As an employer, you can post your own job.
Advantages of one over the other – LinkedIn and BranchOut –
• LinkedIn has for long, been known as a no-nonsense, professional networking website where people come for one purpose and one purpose only – to network with other professionals & generate more business. On the other hand, Facebook is still synonymous with personal and social networking. Majority of individuals continue to use Facebook simply to connect with their family and friends. It is a distinct possibility that many people will prefer to maintain their personal and corporate profiles separately, thus opting to continue using LinkedIn for all professional networking as opposed to Facebook’s BranchOut application.
• BranchOut has an attractive layout and is very easy to use. In fact, all it takes is a couple of simple steps to directly import one’s professional data directly from LinkedIn to BranchOut and setup your BranchOut profile!
• Facebook has a huge network of people and its popularity is growing by the day. Since BranchOut harnesses the power of Facebook networks to grow professional connections, it is possible that BranchOut becomes really big, very soon.
• Some feel that BranchOut’s job search feature is more superior to that of LinkedIn.
• BranchOut provides business-related details by getting together professional data from friends’ profiles. This means that a user will only be able to see such data if friends of friends have added these details to their profiles and made it accessible.
• Moreover, simply by adding more and more people from your friends’ network to your own (who you don’t really know) may not be all that useful. There is a debate between quality and quantity.
While both LinkedIn and BranchOut have strong and weak points, which one is better for you will largely depend on which one gets you more business and turns out to be more profitable for your business!
What do you think, will BranchOut become bigger than LinkedIn? Please leave your questions and comments below.
