Social capital is about relationships and your network and how they can help you to get ahead. Right? But what kind of relationships help you the most and where does LinkedIn fit in? Let’s think about that.

Social capital is considered to be any aspect of social structure that creates value and facilitates the actions and objectives of participants in that structure. Social network theorists dub the “ego” as the focal person in a network who is linked to “alters” in that same network and they measure the strength of the links as weak ties or clique ties. Weak ties would be infrequent and lack intensity or emotion. Clique ties are much stronger and would generally involve friends, advisers, and co workers. It’s the weak ties that form the bridges which connect cliques and form your social network.

Ultimately its the resources made available through these networks that contribute to your social capital. Access to information and visibility would be good examples of these resources. Your network, extended through weak ties, gets you access to these resources. Research suggests that weak ties are just as likely to contribute to a person finding a job or finding their next assignment. Clique ties are more likely to be sources of career sponsorship. They are much more intense but are limited in their reach. Given that we all have limited energy it would follow that the weak ties can be more valuable than clique ties. They’re the ones that extend your network.

So where does that leave us with our basic question about LinkedIn? Well here’s a thought. If you want to increase your social capital you need to build your social network and a great way to do that is by developing more ties, even weak ones, as would come from a tool such as LinkedIn. Of course you need to do much more to develop your social capital but making LinkedIn part of your plan makes a lot of sense, and not just because the good people at LinkedIn want you to think that way.