If you have your eyes set on any business organization or company, be it Bank of America, Procter & Gamble or Time Warner, it’s definitely a good idea to be following their respective LinkedIn pages.  The networking platform sure has carved a niche for itself in social media arena with its utilitarian bent.

Thanks to LinkedIn, any individual with a business aspiration, a career goal, or professional ambition to climb the corporate ladder fast can efficiently network with close to 75 million users who are all a part of it, largely, to locate growth opportunities or to recruit potential candidates for jobs. In the last one year, LinkedIn has also been offering plenty of useful information, tools and services that can help people, whether they work at a company or for themselves – happy to be on their own –

1. To do research
2. To find potential customers
3. To increase their contacts
4. To widen their business
5. To enhance their prospects

Much of these features remain free, although some of the advanced features come at a subscription in the range of $25 to $100. Some of them are as follows:

• Similar to while following friends or business entities on Twitter or Facebook, you will get regular updates in your (personalized) news feed.
• The feeds will incorporate not only domain specific news and relevant job postings, but also useful updates when people are hired, move up the hierarchy, or leave an organization.
• You will be able to keep track of any changes in your network specifically connected to the company of interest to you.
• Other feature that can be quite handy is comprehensive Company pages. They are good for other kinds of valuable research. For example, a module known as ‘related companies’ shows typical career paths.

A case in point is the recent Johnson & Johnson page that shows the healthcare giant has hired more people having earlier worked at Pfizer than from any other pharmaceutical company. And after they left, the next popular destination was either Merck or Novartis.

Such insightful data may give you a good idea when it comes to planning your career moves, or may also help you discover perhaps a little known organization that can act as a stepping stone to the ultimate destination where you want to reach.

Other useful information includes the overall percentage of company employees involved in research & development or sales and marketing functions in comparison to similar companies. That piece of data could prove to be handy for anyone looking to find out attractive opportunities more likely to spring up. They can be useful while getting ready for an interview.

The premium services let you check who viewed at your profile as well as the keywords they employed to do so. They also allow to see expanded profiles of those even outside your network or to scan references on prospects to be recruited by organizations.