5 Plugins that Help You Integrate Your Site with LinkedIn

As the premier social networking channel for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and professionals to connect with each other in a business-related manner, LinkedIn is an important part of the hiring process in virtually any industry. LinkedIn allows recruiters to quickly and easily check the background of perspective employees, while it helps job seekers and job applicants to learn more about the company they’ll be doing business with and the people behind it.

Consequently, it’s important that as an employer, your site integrates well with LinkedIn. These 5 nifty WordPress LinkedIn plugins will show you different ways to do just that.

1. WP LinkedIn

WP LinkedIn is a popular WordPress plugin developed by Claude Vedovini that bundles many different LinkedIn-related functions into one little neat package.

First up, you get a neat little rotating scroller that displays each of the recommendations you’ve received via LinkedIn. This scroller has customizable dimensions. Secondly, the plugin also provides you with the ability to display the essentials of your LinkedIn profile in a nice little window. A similar function strips your LinkedIn profile of most of its text and displays the remaining in a small card. Finally, the last function allows you to display your network updates onsite.

Each of these functions can be used in a post or page with the use of separate shortcodes, each with a few optional attributes included. The plugin also uses the same functionality for 4 widgets.

2. LinkedIn SC

If all you’re looking for is a creative manner to display your LinkedIn profile on your site, then the plugin LinkedIn SC is the right one for you.

The plugin’s error-free and speed and search engine optimized code will parse through your LinkedIn profile and then display each field, as per your customization, via shortcodes on a post or page on your website. You can choose to display both publically displayed and privately kept fields on your LinkedIn profile.

3. LinkedIn Auto Publish

LinkedIn Auto Publish is a unique little piece of WordPress engineering that does exactly what the title says: automatically publishes text to your LinkedIn profile.

If you’re the type of guy who doesn’t have much time to spend on social media (especially complex platforms like LinkedIn!) then choose this plugin as a way to publish updates to your LinkedIn network without having to spend too much time. You can use the familiar WordPress interface to navigate through the process of publishing text messages to your LinkedIn profile.

Each time you publish a new blog post, no matter the post type, the basic text of the post (and the images, if you’d like) will be auto published to your LinkedIn profile as well. Kill two birds with one stone!

You can choose to filter the published messages based on category and post type. You can also disable page publishing and customize the message format.

4. FP LinkedIn Profile

FP LinkedIn Profile, just like LinkedIn SC discussed above, is a new way to display your LinkedIn profile on your site.

What this plugin does is embed a profile summary card into a post or page in your website. The plugin’s settings are quite basic, and allow you to make five customizations: the title, the profile name, and the profile link can be set to your preference. You can also choose to enable or disable display of your connections.

Finally, you can also customize the display format of the summary card and choose whether or not you’d like to use icons in the card.

5. LinkedIn Profile Synchronizer Tool

The LinkedIn Profile Synchronizer Tool plugin is most probably the most advanced plugin on this list. It comes with a complex method of display of your LinkedIn profile on your site.

The LinkedIn Rest API is used to get the data. Once obtained, the data is automatically processed and structured according to the template included in the plugin. The only drawback is that anyone who wants to use this plugin on their site must have a LinkedIn developer account.

Probably, LiPS’s coolest feature is its ability to allow coworkers and ex-coworkers to sing your praises and provide recommendations via the WordPress commenting system! With the recommendation process being that simple, you’ll have positive reviews of your work flowing in from anyone whom you ask.

Wrapping Up

With the growing importance and popularity of LinkedIn as a social network (LinkedIn has a user base of over 300 million, an ever-growing figure), it’s crucial that your site is able to integrate well with LinkedIn. WordPress as a CMS does not come with built-in functionality for that, so it’s important that you look elsewhere, to the WordPress repository, for those capabilities.

Of all the plugins on this list, which is your favorite? Which do you think will be most useful on your website? Let us know in the comments below!

*Image credit: Adrianno Gasparri (woocrack) via Flickr.