With over 259 million active users, LinkedIn is a great place to connect with other like-minded professionals, source candidates, and market your company and personal …

1. Powerful Free LinkedIn Tools & Apps
With over 259 million active users, LinkedIn is a great place to connect with other like-minded
professionals, source candidates, and market your company and personal
brand.
If you already have a profile and are ready to take it to the next level, check out these
free tools and apps to get the most out of LinkedIn without breaking the bank, or your
schedule. (Don’t have a profile and need to catch up? Check out our LinkedIn 101
post, then come back to learn about these LinkedIn Tools.)
Buffer & Hootsuite
According to Buffer, the best time to post to LinkedIn is between 8am and 5pm during
the day. They also recommend posting in the morning or early afternoon for maximum
exposure and testing your audience to determine optimal posting times.
Pre-scheduling content can ensure you post during peak hours no matter what. We
recommend using them in two ways:
 Scheduling content with a longer lifespan (think whitepapers and thought
leadership blogs) 1-2 weeks ahead of time. This will help you maintain a
consistent posting schedule and free up day-to-day time for more time-sensitive
tasks.
 Schedule timely content (think industry or workforce trends) each morning or 1-2
days in advance to build credibility as an up-to-date source. Don’t worry if you
had a post already scheduled, you can always move longer lifespan posts to
another day to make room for breaking content.
In addition to Buffer, Hootsuite also offers great functionality for prescheduling
LinkedIn posts for personal profiles, company pages, and groups. Using a broad social
media tool like these will allow you to tie in your LinkedIn efforts into your overall
social media reporting.
SlideShare
LinkedIn owns SlideShare, so it’s no wonder these two sites work so well together. In a
previous post, we taught you all the basics on creating a robust SlideShare account.
Now you can use that same content to create a dynamic LinkedIn account. Just like
prescheduling content, we recommend using SlideShare and other rich media files in
two ways, based on the content’s lifespan:
 Whitepapers, slides from webinars, and other content with a long lifespan should
be added to your profile.

2.  More time-sensitive content should be included as rich media files in
your LinkedIn updates.
Pulse News
Staying on top of industry news and interacting with other influencers is a must for a
high-impact LinkedIn presence, and Pulse helps you do just that. After customizing the
app by selecting relevant industries and professional topics, you’ll receive a steady
feed of relevant news, allowing you to like, comment and share content easily.
Connection Timeline & InMaps
LinkedIn’s Connection Timeline and InMaps are two tools that are as entertaining as
they are informative. Explore your career history and connections made over time
with the Connection Timeline. This tool could be key to reconnecting with a former
coworker or utilizing 2nd degree connections. InMaps creates an interactive image of
your personal network and its connections, resulting in a beautiful visualization with
clusters of people from specific companies, schools and other groups. This tool is
especially helpful for determining network connectors – people who are strong
networkers and act as a bridge between one network and another.
We hope these tools will help you to use the potential of LinkedIn efficiently. If you
have any other tools or apps you use with LinkedIn, we’d love to hear about them in
the comments.