Let’s see the opportunities arising from joining professional communities.

LinkedIn is the online business platform that comes first to mind. It is the most popular and also the most prominent online professional networking site with 774 million members in over 200 countries worldwide. Microsoft, which is LinkedIn’s owner, profits mainly from membership subscriptions, advertising sales, and recruiting solutions. But, with popularity come great challenges, huge customer expectations and strong competition.

Being the most popular platform, LinkedIn has its weaknesses. One of them is related to feeds being overloaded with not quite relevant content and ads, which doesn’t make individual space feel personal. Other problems are DMs packed with random users trying to sell things or those who only want to add experts to their contacts without starting an actual conversation. Quality connections are pretty much affected by spammers, which pushes a lot of specialists to search other places to get in touch with businesses.

Alternatives to LinkedIn

Professionals around the globe search for platforms that would help them manage their business relationships, share engaging content, match with potential team members, co-work with other experts, build a positive personal brand image, and support the company’s PR.

AngelList

• The most popular LinkedIn alternative is a simple to use and effective platform that helps connect job seekers with a number of organisations looking to hire professionals with targeted skills for free.

Opportunity

• This free service uses a scientific approach to generate suitable sales leads, job opportunities, job candidates, and develop business connections. Algorithms process data, including location, type of industry, skill sets and other signals from the Internet.

Meetup

• This business platform gives plenty of opportunities to meet like-minded people (professionally and personally). Meetup helps schedule events and connects people to do, explore, teach, and learn the things that improve their development.

Sumry

• The world’s first introduction tool helps create a unique story to build better connections. Users create work portfolios with highlighted education, expertise, certifications, experiences, and recommendations for previous job experts.

Data.com Connect

• It’s a free-to-use platform that provides contact numbers and email IDs of individuals (from regular members to senior executives) from targeted companies listed in the business directory.

Xing

• This multi-language European career-oriented networking site offers personal profiles, groups, discussion forums, event coordination, and other standard social community features.

Viadeo

• Though limited to France only, this business platform has members who are business owners, entrepreneurs and managers. Viadeo offers personal profile hosting, keeps an online address book, helps stay connected with contacts and many more.

Hired

• The two-sided marketplace matches companies with technology talents, offering free profile hosting for professionals. Hired collects basic information about candidates and heads it through a series of back-end algorithms to find the best match.

Jobcase

• This free-to-use network allows you to build an extensive work portfolio, showing educational details, work experience, and details regarding preferred salary, working conditions, personal qualities and so on.

CONNECTS – a complex business network

Is there any other platform worth looking at? Personally, as a user and a member of communities, I recommend CONNECTS – an intriguing solution that continues to gain popularity. It’s a nice virtual space that enables users to develop deep and meaningful business relationships online.

What can you do on CONNECTS? Most of all you can:

• Post and share an unlimited amount of opportunities
• Create a company profile and tell a story
• Be part of online business communities

How does CONNECTS work?

CONNECTS is a business match-making platform that allows entrepreneurs to initiate business opportunities worldwide. However, this isn’t a standard B2B.

The CONNECTS Communities feature is all about B4B (business-for-business), where members are encouraged to help each other and exchange valuable skills and information to grow stronger together.

As a CONNECTS user it is possible to see examples of successful community ideas and support a company with custom features:

• Region focused communities
• Sector-based communities
• Topic-based communities
• Issue-based communities
• Collaboration between Chambers or companies

Any other benefits? Well, there’s more to do on a business platform like CONNECTS e.g.:

• Sharing inspiration and supporting your activities and communities inside the platform, integrating your business with the CONNECTS platform to stimulate growth;
  
  
• Revitalising your business’s international reach, access to information and ESG related opportunities;
  
  
• Collaborating in real-time with your industry, business and chambers of commerce alike;
  
  
• Sharing opportunities, ideas, projects and work simultaneously inside a community to build a long-lasting business relationship.

CONNECTS is still growing

Soon, CONNECTS plans to expand and add crucial improvements. It would be available in more languages (now it operates in English, French, German and Spanish). What is more, the platform will be integrated with AI to offer predictive match-making.

The number of communities and events will increase, and last but not least, there will be a mobile app launched. It’s a well-suited solution as 69% of CONNECTS users confirm that it helps them discover new insights and develop business strategies. And as one of them I believe that it’s a valuable place to join and expand business networks.