Online social networks took off a few years ago for recruiting but it is only in the last year or so that they have proved their effectiveness in China.

The obvious winner is Linkedin which has the biggest connection base in China, but there are upcoming players like Xing and Viadeo which capture niche markets. Xing is strong for the German/China market and Viadeo is strong in France/China. Even Plaxo has recently developed a social element to its email connectivity offering. Who’d a thunk!

Social software sites offer subscribers a chance to connect with literally millions of people but there is a job of work that needs to be done to ensure that you are getting the most out of them. Here are my takeaways for getting the most out of LinkedIn with the least effort on your part:

- Join LinkedIn and set your preference for maximum exposure. Let everyone connect to you by putting your email address in the header, and allow them to see all your connections. Welcome everyone and wrap your arms around the world. Don’t worry, this is only temporary, we’re going to go on lock down later.

- Find the top linkedin users and link to the the Top 10 using the Add Them As a Connection function. None of them will refuse you and it only takes about 20 minutes because they show you their email address. Now you have a huge base of connections ie. people.

- After a few days, during which time you do your real work, take a look at your database of people and decide if you want to go forward with this. Ask yourself: Is this interesting? Can you see the right kind of people in your target area? If so link to the remaining 40 people.

- Wait a week and see how things have changed. More interesting now? If so continue.

- Look at the connections of the Top 50 and choose the ones that have high connections. Ignore the rest. Spend a certain amount of time connecting to these people and then stop. I know it seems selfish but get past it. This is about you, not everyone else. Your time is precious and not all connections are equal.

- Now change your settings so that your privacy is set at a higher level. You decide the level. Close off your connections to other LinkedIn users a little by only allowing them to see your shared connections. Remember that some of those people could be your competitors. Sharing is good but sharing for the sake of sharing is not. Protect your market base.

- Identify your areas of interest. It could be Russia and the plastic injection industry, or Japan and the automotive industry. Find people in this area and ask them to connect to you. Ignore everyone else. For now.

- Finally, look inside your own contact base (you could even do this earlier). This is the set of people that you have a direct connection to ie. you have their email address. Invite them all to link to you.

Continue as needed. Now you have a very large base of people to connect to but you will not have been inundated with requests to connect while you built this base. You can open up if you want to, and I do. This is done by leaving your email address in your header, thereby literally inviting people to connect with you. You might want to consider this because it does give you 2-3 requests to link per day. You can manage this by only going into Linkedin once per week and saying yes to all requests in one go. This is what I do.

If you have a blog, you might consider connecting it to Jaxtr so you can link your existing phone(s) to your LinkedIn profile. The phone number stays private so it is consistent with the approach detailed above. Now people who visit your profile can call you from all over the world for free. Amazingly, even if they call you from their mobile phone, to your mobile phone. You can join here.

If you want to know more I would suggest you contact Shally Steckerl or Dave Mendoza. You literally won’t believe the amount of connections they have. Think of the highest number of connections you can imagine them having, and then multiple by the first number that comes into your head.

You’ll still be short.