LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, where members can share their CV online, keep in touch with professional contacts and find new career opportunities. At first blush it perhaps does not seem very useful to academics, but it is an excellent network tool and a way to keep tabs on erstwhile colleagues and students. LinkedIn also offers the chance to discover new possibilities for collaboration or other career opportunities, through posts by those in your network or through groups you can join. Another strong point of LinkedIn for academics is that it allows those outside academia to easily find you. In fact, during the workshop I followed earlier this year, Hermen Visser mentioned that LinkedIn is one of the prime tools journalists use to discover more about people and to find ways to contact them.

In the past year LinkedIn has also increased its focus on academics, with the new LinkedIn University pages for prospective students, employees and alumni. This increasing focus and the growing demands on academics as regards outreach to a wider public make LinkedIn is a useful tool for any researcher.

Altmetrics

LinkedIn has no bearing on the creation of altmetric scores, as there isn't a relevant metric to measure, but altmetrics can be utilised on your LinkedIn page. Why would you want to include altmetrics on your LinkedIn page, what does it indicate? You can let altmetrics show the impact of your more recently published work, let them de-emphasise metrics that aren't entirely suited to your field, and generally let you put your work into a larger context. As noted here on the Impact Story blog it also indicates that you as a researcher are keeping abreast of developments in scholarly communication and valorisation, an aspect that is becoming more and more important in today's academic world.