If forced to give up all your social media accounts but one, which one would you choose to keep?  With Google+ gaining wider adoption (like we needed another one), and all of them racing to gain your loyalty, the landscape is becoming very crowded to say the least. Although all of them share many of the same basic features, each have unique aspects that I enjoy. Such as the ability to communicate with literally anyone with a simple @ symbol on Twitter, the ease and practicality of grouping your connections into custom "circles" on Google +, and when it comes to sharing vacation photos, Facebook reigns supreme. However, for overall functionality and applicable features, LinkedIn is my clear winner and here's why.

Although almost all of the platforms center around the concept of sharing content within their "circle" of people, LinkedIn offers some unique features that separate it from the rest. Though there are some great social management tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck, LinkedIn's Signal offers the practical search feature of allowing users to easily filter through the masses of updates to find posts of interest. From the home page, LinkedIn Signal is located under News on the top navigation bar.

What makes this tool so robust is in the ability to filter through the noise. For example, within the 4 million+ updates happening within my network, I'm able to narrow down to those talking about the term "LinkedIn", who live in Portland, and have posted within the last week. Additional filters could include the company they work, industry, topic, seniority of the person, or even the school they attended.

For those in the job market dying to know if you or your resume are getting noticed, LinkedIn's unique "Who's Viewed Your Profile" offers some great insight. With more and more recruiters and hiring managers leveraging LinkedIn, its safe to say that the person looking at your resume may also be paying your profile a visit. If you're not getting an email or phone call once they've viewed your profile, you may want to consider building it up.

Sites like glassdoor.com offer some great company insights like salaries, employee reviews, and employee company ratings,  but LinkedIn's company pages offer some additional useful resources for job seekers. Drilling into a companies statistics from their company page provides information like, where employees worked both before and after, company growth based on similar companies in the same industry and size, and employee tenures which is useful if looking to avoid companies with high turnover.

In addition to the high placement within search engines, I appreciate the ability to track my appearances in search activity. For those doing personal branding, this can very insightful. If your not getting noticed it may be time to enhance your profile with some rich keywords.

When it comes to group features within the social media platforms, LinkedIn has always been light years ahead. Groups can almost take on a life of their own and even become their own small, (and sometimes large), community. The ability to pick and choose relevant groups from the huge directory, customization of how content is distributed to you on a per group basis, and clean interface is much more advanced then all the others. Offering engaging content in these groups also provides the opportunity of getting noticed. For those looking to network, this translates into the ability of getting your name in front of many of the right people.

For publishers and bloggers looking to distribute content, no other network offers the same scalability as LinkedIn. While all of them allow content to be shared from sites through their social plug-ins, only LinkedIn allows the ability to share both on your own profile to your personal network, but to all of your groups as well. With just a few clicks, your article has the potential of being shared with hundreds of thousands people depending on the size of the groups that user is a part of. For example, I'm connected with over 3 million people between my fifty subscribed groups. This gives me the ability to share content at an incredible scale that is unmatched by the others.

While I'm fairly certain my compelling reasoning won't be enough to cause a mass exodus from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ over to LinkedIn, I do hope this encourages any of you who are not already on LinkedIn to give it a try.

As always, feel free to sync up with me on any of my profiles.

| More...