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Source: ONE News -
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A networking site for professionals, which is adding users at a rate of one per second, says New Zealand businesses are not doing enough to take advantage of online services.
LinkedIn's Australian and New Zealand head Cliff Rosenberg, a keynote speaker at the Social Media Junction conference in Auckland, says NZ businesses could be doing more.
He says there are encouraging signs that potential is there but it's still early days and New Zealand businesses need to get smart and target their online use to their actual intended market.
Rosenberg told TVNZ today it's important to differentiate between social networking on sites like Facebook and professional networking like LinkedIn offers.
LinkedIn and other professional networking sites allow people to enhance their brand, connect with like-minded others, develop a business network and gather industry insights he told NZI Business. Linkedin is the world's largest professional network with 80 million users including a quarter of a million in New Zealand.
"Social networking is much more for social gaming, photo sharing and more about dialogue with family and friends. LinkedIn is for professional networking purposes only and we are fairly strict about sticking to that," said Rosenberg.
He says businesses that can benefit from sites like LinkedIn are marketers who can access a "highly affluent community" while recruiters can access millions of professionals, including many not actively looking for a job.
LinkedIn believes its site is a "great platform" for NZ businesses to advertise on but stresses that that should also be done in a targeted manner.
"You want to target your ads to specific types of people across the network, you want to engage and have a dialogue ...the more your adverts can be seen as content than a sales proposition, the better off you are," Rosenberg said.
The two-day Social Media Junction conference starts today.