Look at Professional Networking Sites besides LinkedIn

Even though Brazen Careerist and Biznik aren’t as popular as Facebook or LinkedIn, they may still have some benefit for job seekers. Not only do they help you cast a wider net, but also they help facilitate interactions that may turn out to be valuable some day. So whatever your motivation for expanding beyond LinkedIn, try these networking sites out and see whether you like how they work.

Professional networking site Brazen Careerist

Brazen Careerist is a social network designed to provide a platform for young professionals to express their ideas and interact with one another. On the Brazen Careerist site, Facebook meets LinkedIn in the sense that most discussions are about professional topics, but there’s no shyness around talking with new people — in fact, members are encouraged to comment and interact with one another.

The site’s founders, Penelope Trunk and Ryan Pough, believe that “your ideas are your résumé” — meaning you don’t have to fill out your past work, school, or anything else to complete your profile. Instead, the ideas you bring to the collective discussion are more important.

Every day, Brazen Careerist features blog posts from active members. These blogs can help grow your professional exposure. Brazen Careerist also encourages local, face-to-face networking.

One of Brazen Careerist’s most innovative contributions to the world of social networking is called Networking Roulette. It takes the basic idea of being thrust into a random video chat but with professional networking as the main focus.

When you participate in Networking Roulette, you have three minutes to talk with the other person and choose whether they can help your network. Each month, Brazen Careerist changes the theme. One month it may be on mentorship; another month it may be on leadership.

Joining Brazen Careerist for a couple of reasons. First, major companies look for fresh new talent here. Because they totally get that “ideas are your résumé,” the fact that you’re showing what you can do, not what you did, makes it easy to move into new job roles. Second, most of the people on Brazen Careerist want to expand their network and typically show genuine interest in helping others.

Professional networking site Biznik

Biznik is a community of small business professionals looking to network their services by fostering in-person interactions. Biznik's main focus isn’t for job seekers; however, if your job search is primarily focused on finding work at a small business or if you have aspirations of starting your own business, then Biznik is a very active community to join.

Apart from offering face-to-face networking events in most cities and towns, Biznik boasts of being Google friendly. In fact, users can update their tags and Google Summary on their profile in order to better control how they appear on search results. This summary connects to every article they publish in the Biznik community, so a user’s reward for participation is possible higher Google rankings.

Biznik really is focused on small business, so don’t expect to find glaringly obvious job opportunities. Use it, instead, to research small businesses in your community that you can network with and provide some value to.

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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/look-at-professional-networking-sites-besides-link.html