LinkedIn Business Directory: It's Just Like Facebook

LinkedIn will be launching company directory pages today. The pages show employees from the company as well as company data which has been compiled by Capital IQ. Aside from the addition of company data, these new pages are pretty much the same thing as network pages within Facebook. The only difference is that other people can view the pages without being members.

I’ve discussed this before, social networks are transforming the way that businesses find new employees. A college student trying to figure out which company to go join when they graduate (if that’s what they want to do), can simply do a search in Facebook and find all the employees that work there. After browsing through some of the employee profiles they can get a pretty good feeling for if that company is a place they want to work.

While I think these directory pages are a great addition, I don’t think LinkedIn profiles give you much insight to the personalities of the individuals. Instead they are promotional tools to simply display how connected you are as well as what type of clients you have worked with (via their recommendations system). As such, I think a lot of these features would be better leveraged on Facebook. Do you think these new pages are useful?

Image via Caroline McCarthy

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