LinkedIn is one of many social networking platforms, but it is certainly the most popular one for business needs. Now, LinkedIn is enhancing the social networking experience by offering the ability to control who sees what information.

One of the most useful parts of Facebook has always been the ability to control which members of your network have access to which information. For example, you could set your filters so that your family and professional contacts were seeing different items and updates. LinkedIn has finally adopted this feature, giving users’ complete control over who sees which updates – whether it’s everyone, specific connections, a group you belong to or a specific user. Depending on how you use your LinkedIn statuses, this can be a really powerful way to target individual pieces of content toward the right audience. It gets rid of that firehouse effect that we often get trying to share information in social networking and ciphers directly into the group you’re most interested in reaching.

This is a smart move on LinkedIn’s part, it prevents prospective employers from Googling you and seeing information you do not want them to find (though you shouldn’t be putting that info on LinkedIn anyway). Basically, they’re offering individuals a chance to engage in their own personal web reputation management campaign.

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/04/linkedin-increases-social-sharing-options.html