Student engagement with LinkedIn to enhance employability

Social networking sites are an increasingly important tool for career development: LinkedIn particularly, is a site for business professionals, focusing on business connections and industry contacts for employers and professionals. Often however students do not engage with LinkedIn as they consider it too ‘profession focussed.’ There is a lack of awareness also about how they can use the platform to enhance their employability. Whilst recognising previous works on social media for teaching and learning in HE, this chapter examines the challenges facing students in respect of engaging with LinkedIn for career progression. It identifies the efforts that students make in building and maintaining networks, in becoming part of professional networks, via willing engagement. This chapter contributes to knowledge about LinkedIn, from a professional development point of view, offering suggestions to help students and tutors make the best use of LinkedIn, to improve both student engagement and subsequent employability (3882)

Adoption of Digital Collaborative Networking Platforms in Companies: A Study of Twitter Usage in Finland

Digital collaborative networking platforms have become increasingly important for companies. They are widely used for communication and co-creation with customers, suppliers and other actors in companies’ value chains. This study takes one social media platform: Twitter, as an example of a digital collaboration platform and analyses patterns of Twitter usage among Finnish companies. The empirical part of the study is based on survey data (n=554 companies) and Twitter usage data of 107 of the same companies. The research data is analyzed to find the extent to which companies have adopted Twitter and for what purposes it is being used. The results of the study show that surprisingly few companies have a Twitter account and most commonly companies use Twitter to communicate about news and events to the large public. Hence, plenty of opportunities remain for taking social media platforms more efficiently in use for collaborative networking and co-creation