LinkedIn Quietly Making Big Strides

These days, if you don't completely overhaul your website's layout or have a possibly-scandalous movie coming out, it can be hard for your social network to get much attention.

This is the problem LinkedIn has been facing, because despite being an afterthought in the minds of many people across the social media universe, the professional-centric network has actually made a few solid upgrades over the last week or so.

These changes include a couple of beta projects like a LinkedIn-Twitter hybrid called LinkedIn Signal (which filters and displays tweets from people in your network) and a LinkedIn Career Explorer that lets college grads see data and stats about their prospective fields to better gauge where their industry is at.

But my favorite change is the upgrade to the company pages on the site, which now feature more prominent "Follow Company" buttons, easier-to-view employee profiles, and graphs that allow you to see the composition of the company. These graphs show the different job functions of the employees, as well as the educational degree and where the employees went to school. Most impressive, you can see the experience levels of the company's employees. Here's Axiom's experience level graph:

As you can see, graphs like these provide simple and usable data that even casual LinkedIn users can get something out of. Also, these graphs will require that employees keep their profiles updated to better ensure their accuracy.

So although LinkedIn's 80 million users are dwarfed by the hundreds of millions who use Facebook and Twitter, they are making the necessary upgrades to stay competitive with these larger networks.