# Professional Networking Websites: How to Choose One and Use It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/professional-networking-websites/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/professional-networking-websites.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving networking at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Professional networking websites go well beyond LinkedIn. Here's what each platform is actually for, how to pick the one that fits you, and what to do next. ## Key facts - Title: Professional Networking Websites: How to Choose One and Use It - Category: Networking - Primary skill: Networking - Related skills: Communication, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: professional networking websites - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/professional-networking-websites/ ## What this page covers - Professional networking websites go well beyond LinkedIn. Here's what each platform is actually for, how to pick the one that fits you, and what to do next. - Practical guidance for professional networking websites - How this topic connects to Networking ## Detailed explanation Professional networking websites split into three groups: one general hub that almost everyone uses, LinkedIn; platforms built around events and communities rather than profiles, such as Meetup and industry Slack groups; and specialist sites tied to a single field or region, like GitHub, Xing, and Wellfound. Most people need LinkedIn plus one of the others. That is the easy half. The harder half is that you can read a ranking, open three accounts in an afternoon, and sit in exactly the same position a month later — which is usually the point at which someone searches this term again. There is a reason for that, and it has very little to do with picking wrong. ## What the rankings leave out Almost every result for this term is a ranked list, and the more honest ones admit the problem themselves: sources such as Sorce and iON Future state outright that there is no single best networking site and that the right one depends on your industry and your goals. Then they hand you ten of them anyway. The question they raise is the one they decline to answer. They also share a blind spot. Every entry is presented as a place to meet people you have never met, which quietly skips the most useful contacts you already have — course mates, lecturers, the team from an internship, a manager from a summer job. Those people know you are real, and on a general platform they stay findable for years. Coverage then stops at signing up and [optimizing a profile](/knowledge/networking/how-to-optimize-your-linkedin-profile/). Across the top-ranking round-ups, none explain what to write in a [first message](/knowledge/networking/cold-linkedin-message-template/), how often to be in contact, or how to keep a connection from [going cold](/knowledge/networking/maintain-professional-network/). None of them report response rates or outcomes either, so there is no published evidence that platform choice is what separates the people who get something out of this from the people who do not. So read the list below twice: once for what each site is, and once for whether you have any actual reason to be on it. ## The professional networking websites worth knowing ### LinkedIn The default, and the only one with genuinely universal reach. LinkedIn's own figures put it above 1.2 billion members across 200 countries and regions, though older pages still quote 700 million, so treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a statistic. Its position is a network effect rather than a verdict on the product: recruiters search it because candidates are there, and candidates join because recruiters search it. Which settles the anxious question sitting underneath most searches for this term — you are not missing a secret better platform. The free account does everything described on this page. ### Meetup and Eventbrite Meetup runs local and online groups and recurring events around industries, skills, technology, public speaking and professional development, and Dice describes it as the alternative for people whose problem is not finding profiles but forming relationships. The mechanism is repetition. A connection request produces one contact and then silence; a group that meets every month produces the same faces four times, which is how an acquaintance turns into someone who would take your call. Both Dice and Virtual Vocations note that you build standing faster by starting a group or helping the organizer than by attending. Eventbrite covers the same need one event at a time — career fairs and industry evenings, no profile required. ### GitHub Not a networking site by design, and one of the more effective ones in practice. Dice reports more than 100 million developers and 4 million organizations on it, and describes its function plainly: a stranger can inspect your work and understand how you build. That inverts the usual order. Everywhere else you introduce yourself and hope the work is taken on trust; here the work introduces you, and the conversation starts from evidence. Contributing to someone's project is a networking act wearing technical clothes — useful if you write code, irrelevant if you do not. ### Industry Slack and Facebook groups Also not networking products, and heavily used as networking venues. Search Engine Journal points to Slack communities for niches from startup founders to UX designers, and Dice to Facebook groups for mobile developers, programmers, software engineers and data scientists, with events, discussion and messaging built in. What they give you that a profile cannot is familiarity before contact. Answer two questions in a channel over a month and you are no longer a stranger writing out of nowhere, which removes most of what makes the first message hard. ### Xing The regional case, and the clearest example of geography beating size: roughly 21 million users concentrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. If you are looking for work in those markets, local recruiter presence matters more to you than a global member count does. If you are not, it is still a reminder to check whether your country has an equivalent. ### Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) The startup and tech hub, reported by Wikipedia at more than 35,000 recruiting companies, over 2,000,000 candidates and 5 million registered users. Its value is concentration rather than size — it gathers a category of employer that is thin on general job boards, where small companies without recruitment budgets are otherwise hard to find. Decisive if startups are the direction you want; safely ignored if they are not. ### PowerToFly A career platform connecting women and under-represented professionals with inclusive employers, which Dice describes as combining curated roles with virtual events, networking sessions and career development resources. The events are the part that matters. Job listings alone would make it another board; the sessions give you the same repeated, low-stakes contact that makes Meetup work, in a room selected for people in a comparable position to yours. ### Contra and Peerlist Two newer platforms built against the CV-and-feed model. Contra bundles portfolio, contracts, invoicing and payments for freelancers; Peerlist emphasizes proof-of-work profiles, verified credentials and project discovery instead of a social feed. Both are small next to the incumbents, so treat them as worth knowing about rather than worth joining by default — genuinely useful if you freelance, or if you would rather be judged on what you have built than on how long you have been working. ### Alignable and Glassdoor, which are probably not for you Both appear in these round-ups and neither builds an individual's network. Alignable is built for business owners looking for customers, partners and referrals from other owners, so as an employee you would arrive with nothing to trade. Glassdoor is employer research — salary data and reviews from current and former staff — which is useful before an interview and does nothing for your contacts. Recognizing a mismatch is part of choosing well, and it saves you two accounts. ## How to choose, and what happens in the first ten minutes The decision rule the lists withhold is short. Take LinkedIn as a given. Then add exactly one more, chosen by whichever of these applies to you: your country has its own platform, your work can be inspected rather than described, your field has a Slack or Facebook community, or your problem is that you know nobody and you need to be in a room. Two accounts, used, beat six that exist. Then spend the first ten minutes on the part the round-ups skip. Not the profile — a list of people. Fifteen names you already know, from your course, your last job, anywhere. Reconnecting with someone who remembers you is a much shorter conversation than introducing yourself to a stranger, and it is where almost everyone's [usable network](/knowledge/networking/building-a-professional-network/) actually comes from. If you are going to give this an hour, it is worth knowing first [where that hour belongs](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — on the profile, on the message, or simply on sending it. That is a question about you rather than about the platforms, and it takes about seven minutes to answer for free. ## The part that decides whether any of this works The people who get something out of Meetup tend to get something out of a Slack channel too, and the reason is not that they chose more carefully. Three specific habits sit underneath every entry on the list, and each of them is learnable. **Networking**, in the sense that matters here, is personal connection rather than social media — the sites are infrastructure for it, not a substitute. The habits are concrete: build relationships before you need them, offer something first without keeping score, contact someone you do not know only when you have a real reason, follow up within a day of meeting them with a detail from what they said, and be honest about which handful of people you will actively stay close to and which you will simply respond to when they surface. That last distinction is what keeps a growing contact list from becoming noise. **Communication** is where online networking usually stalls, because it runs entirely on written messages that arrive uninvited. The corrections are unglamorous: lead with your main point instead of building up to it, keep it short, be clear about what you are asking, and write to the specific person rather than at a category. It also helps to know what writing is bad at. Trust, anything sensitive, anything complicated — those belong in conversation, so the job of a good message is not to impress but to earn one. **Building Confidence** explains the gap between reading this page and doing anything about it. Comparing platforms feels productive while costing nothing, which is the shape procrastination takes here. The remedy is unromantic: decide in advance exactly when you will write, to whom, and from where, and treat only the first message as the task rather than the whole network. Confidence follows the action rather than preceding it — you get to feel awkward and send it anyway, and after four or five the awkwardness stops being the deciding factor. Confidence is also the hardest of the three to judge from the inside, which is what the free Job Skills Test is for. Seven minutes, twelve work skills scored, these three among them, and [where each one stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) right now. None of the scores describe a fixed trait — that is rather the point of measuring them. ## What you are actually deciding You came looking for a list of sites and stayed for a section about what to write. That order is unusual, and it is the one that works — most people open the accounts first and figure out the purpose later, if at all. Nothing here asks you to be a different person online. These are behaviors, and a gap in one of them is something not yet learned rather than a limit on what you are like. What does shift is the value: the number of people who would answer a message from you is the one line on your professional record that cannot be improved in a week, and it counts for more with every year you work. At this stage nobody expects you to have a network yet, which makes now the cheapest it will ever be to start one. Which leaves one thing a comparison of platforms cannot tell you. ## Before you open another account You have the map. What is missing is an honest reading of what you would bring to any of these sites. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes about seven minutes, scores you across all twelve, and shows which ones will make the biggest difference to you right now. Take it, look at the lowest two, and let them decide where your next hour goes. One platform and one habit, worked at properly, will do more for you than nine open accounts. **Get my skills profile** *Free, seven minutes, and your results appear on screen as soon as you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Professional networking websites go well beyond LinkedIn. Here's what each platform is actually for, how to pick the one that fits you, and what to do next. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Networking. It also relates to Communication, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/professional-networking-websites/ Preferred summary: "Professional networking websites go well beyond LinkedIn. Here's what each platform is actually for, how to pick the one that fits you, and what to do next." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.