Facebook biz app challenges, but LinkedIn’s fighting back

On Monday, Monster.com, the popular job board, introduced a software app that lets Facebook users cordon off a section of the social network to use for business or job-seeking related purposes. The app, called BeKnown, means there’s “no need to hop all over the place to maintain separate networks anymore,” a Monster publicist wrote in her pitch to get me interested in covering the subject.

Gee, I wonder what she’s referring to? Of course, it’s LinkedIn, the social network that’s more business than pleasure. Though roughly a seventh of the size of Facebook – 100 million members v. 700 million by some accounts – LinkedIn has long had a lock on the business side of social networking. Now it looks as if Facebook’s after LinkedIn’s piece of the business networking pie. Here’s a post that Monster.com published on its blog yesterday explaining how to use BeKnown.

But LinkedIn hasn’t been standing still. Fueled with cash from a recent initial public stock offering, the company has been furiously adding Facebook and Twitter-style features, all the better to keep users happy and logged on longer.

If it’s been a few months since you last visited LinkedIn, you’re missing out on a boatload of tools and other goodies the online business network has added. Among them are a number that directly or indirectly help independent journalists and other freelance writers find sources, do research and look for work.

I recently recapped LinkedIn’s new features in a story for SecondAct, Entrepreneur Media’s website for people over 40 where I write twice a week. Read the entire post here:

10 new need-to-know features on LinkedIn.

Tune in again tomorrow when I look at new services for journalists that all three major online networks – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – have started or re-engineered in recent weeks.