Outlook 2013 and LinkedIn make a productive pair. LinkedIn invites you to create links with people you know, both business acquaintances and personal friends. However, the people with whom you create connections on LinkedIn must be LinkedIn members, too.
LinkedIn is the largest and best-known social media service. You rarely find people describing what they had for breakfast or posting pictures of their kittens there. LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for finding jobs and discovering people with common business interests.
Figuring out which LinkedIn members you might already know can be a time-consuming chore. Connecting LinkedIn with Outlook makes that task simpler and makes both products more valuable and easier to use.
When you add LinkedIn to the Outlook Social Connector, a new contact folder appears in the Navigation pane and displays everyone with whom you’re connected on LinkedIn, including pictures and contact information, organized just like your regular Outlook contacts. It also links to that person’s LinkedIn profile in the website box, which allows you to look up information about that person.
The connection to Facebook works in much the same way. And if your Facebook friends are also on LinkedIn, you’ll see a link to their Facebook profile from their Outlook contact details.
Facebook is probably the most popular site for the lighter side of life, and is the way many people stay connected to family and friends. It’s the place where people post photos and freely talk about that Las Vegas vacation and everything that happened there (and should have stayed there).
Adding a LinkedIn or Facebook connection to Outlook is pretty easy, assuming you already have an account at those places:
Click the File tab from anywhere in Outlook.
Choose Social Network Accounts under the Account Settings button.
Click LinkedIn or Facebook.
No matter which you choose, the process is the same from here.
Enter your social network user name and password.
Click Connect.
Outlook tries to log in to the selected social network using the credentials that you provided.
Click Finish.
Microsoft product managers have promised to add connectors that show information from other social media services.
