In Part I we looked at an overview of Linkedin and touched on the use of Groups in the Heat Treat Industry. The growing number of groups (now over 50 for Heat Treat and Heat Treatment alone) makes it difficult to keep up with everything that is being discussed across the Industry.

Part II is intended to show a quick way of looking across all of those groups.

Step 1. Enter Heat Treat or Heat Treatment in the Updates section to the top right of the Linkedin page

Step 2. Highlight Groups on the  Update Type option – bottom left of page

These two steps will then show the latest updates across all relevant groups in the main window (see below).

Part III in this series of Industry updates will look at how to optimize the Google Alerts tool and remove unwanted information from your Heat Treat or Heat Treatment search.

Linkedin www.linkedin.com now attracts over 150 million members from data released in February this year. A quick search on this network produces 3,719 people who have involvement in Heat Treat or Heat Treatment in the US.

Linkedin is a great resource for connecting to people, providing a platform for asking and answering questions, and allows you to monitor the latest discussions in a variety of Industries.

The Groups section allows you to search for Industry communities that are discussing real and relevant issues. There are currently over 50 groups that can be searched using “Heat Treatment” or “Heat Treat”

One example of a Heat Treatment group is the “Heat Treatment and Beyond” group. This group has close to 600 members and is intended to be a news source (and discussion) about Heat Treatment. Relevant Heat Treat “twitter” feeds are used to populate the discussion board in near real-time and these are supplemented by members discussions and questions.

In Part II we will look at ways to search for Industry updates across all groups.