Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

There’s one really beneficial area of LinkedIn that has spurred it ahead of Facebook as a social network for professionals. Aside from the clear professional focus of the social network, it’s questions & answers format is a huge advantage to marketing professionals and other verticals.

By asking questions on LinkedIn, a user is able to leverage the immense base of professionals already on LinkedIn to gain valuable insight and get quick, [mostly] thoughtful answers. I’ve already used the service to ask a few questions that I’ve been having a hard time with and have gotten tons of really intelligent responses. It’s kind of like Yahoo! Answers for professional, and it works really well!

LinkedIn took it one step farther – not only did they launch the Q&A model, but they also introduced a valuable ranking tool. A user posting the question can rate their responses and pick the best answer. That best answer then follows the person that posts it and is visible to other users looking at their profile. By leveraging the best answer functionality, LinkedIn is then able to determine experts within the field in which the question was asked. Awesome!