With polls you can quickly and cost effectively understand a group of people and analyse the results. These results can be categorised by demographic data such as company size, job title, age or gender. To get the best response to your poll, try these tips:

You can create a poll from within the Polls application by asking one question and offering up to 5 possible answer choices for your audience to vote on. After you install Polls you can:

Source: LinkedIn.com

1. After login, click on Edit Profile via the top menu (Profile tab)
2. Go to the Experience section
3. Hoover with your mouse over the position you want to move, it will turn light-blue, and drag and drop it in the desired spot

If you’ve been following specific companies (either your own, your competitors or a company you’d like to work for) you’ll now start seeing status updates shared by the company in your homepage news feed. This will not only keep you informed of insightful content from companies you love and follow, but will also let you comment on it, “like” or share with your own professional network.

The following video explains it in more detail:

1) Annual job promotions

Does the best time to be promoted vary around the world? LinkedIn used the data of millions of its international members and confirms that January is the most popular month for promotions. In the US, while January is the top month for promotions, the spread throughout the year is more uniform than the global average.

2) What’s in a Professional name?

Are some names more successful than others? Is your name influencing your career? Or are both your career and choice of name influenced by factors like personality and values? Any attempt to explore these questions would need some cold, hard data. LinkedIn is the perfect place to start.

3) The top names that are over-represented among CEOs.

An infographic by the LinkedIn Analytics team.

4) Sequencing the startup DNA

What makes entrepreneurs different, and where do they come from? Are they born or taught? Are they unusually mobile in their careers? Does geography play a role? Do mentors and relationships matter? By sifting through more than 120 million public profiles, LinkedIn analyzed tens of thousands of startup founders’ profiles – and found common threads linking their careers.

5) Who are the savviest networkers?

The overall result in the US is that men are overall more savvy networkers than women, but the real insights start to surface when you start slicing and dicing by industry and company.  Check out this infographic below highlighting some main insights.

6) Office pet peeves

Whether it be the empty coffee pot or the gum-smacking intern, the laundry list of office pet peeves is getting longer and longer with people not taking ownership for their actions having the distinction of hitting the number one spot in LinkedIn’s global survey of most irritating office pet peeves.

7) 100 million LinkedIn members

LinkedIn reached a major milestone on 22nd of March 2011: 100 million professionals worldwide. They’re growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second. Here are some more interesting facts and figures about LinkedIn:

Have you seen other great infographics about LinkedIn? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

These updates can be found and seen by anyone in your network (first, second and third degree) . Just make sure you have the correct activity feed settings if you want maximum visibility. You have the extra possibility to post it to your Twitter account, other groups of individual contacts.

By hovering or clicking on the IN-logo, a pop-up window appears that contains a short LinkedIn profile with the information of a specific member. Test it yourself and get the code for this Member Profile Widget here to include it on your personal or company website.

In the above example, the code is:

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/MemberProfile” data-id=”http://www.linkedin.com/in/jacco” data-format=”hover” data-text=”Jacco Valkenburg“></script>

If you are new to LinkedIn, or spending time to enhance your personal branding on LinkedIn, it’s helpful for establishing a baseline and see if your efforts return results e.g. number of views. And if you noticed that you don’t attract the ‘right’ viewers you may want to change or add a few keywords.

Attached video gives some more explanation about this (paid) functionality for LinkedIn users:

You can find the “Who’s viewed my profile” box right on the homepage, once you logged in. If you have a business or job seeker account at LinkedIn it will even provide you with lots of interesting demographic data and statistics about your visitors.

(first 3 months of 2010 and 2011 for comparison reasons)

What does this mean? Professional recruitment (hiring) solutions are already responsible for 49% of the total revenue and is increasingly becoming a more important revenue stream (up 274%!). Marketing solutions, like bannering and email direct marketing, doubled in revenue (195%). Individual subscription memberships is growing but is relatively modest.