microDomination: How to leverage social media and content marketing to build a mini-business empire around your personal brand by Trevor Young

Author:Trevor Young [Young, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-02-11T14:00:00+00:00

LinkedIn: Facebook for suits

I love LinkedIn, the social network sometimes referred to as Facebook for suits. It’s a pretty apt description, because it’s a social network (like Facebook) but its focus is the business and the corporate sector.

That said, LinkedIn tends not to be anywhere near as interactive or as social as Facebook. This could be because corporate types don’t want to be seen to be interacting with people on the internet. The other thing to consider is that, for many people, LinkedIn is the first and perhaps only social network they are on and so they are probably still getting the hang of it. Whatever the reason, in my experience — and I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2005 — people do lurk on the site to see what’s going on within their network, they’re just not as participatory as they could be. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because by getting involved, you’re likely to stand out and get noticed more.

If you deal with professional business people, from the corporate sector in particular, you need to be on LinkedIn. And if you’re going to have a LinkedIn page, you may as well ensure it does justice to the professional you.

The rationale is simple: the people you do business with — your potential customers — will often use LinkedIn to check you out in advance, to see if you are professional and credible, to ensure you’re a suitable person for them to do business with. Having a fully loaded profile page complete with testimonials, details of your experience, a succinct and accurate summary, capped off with a professional headshot, is a good start, but it is just the beginning.

There is a lot more to LinkedIn than it just being an online résumé. I used to belong to the school of thought that you only connected with people with whom you had exchanged business cards. But now, particularly as I speak at a lot of events (as you may well do, or start to do at some stage), there are people that I have never met who invite me to connect with them on LinkedIn. This in effect means I become part of their online network, and they become a part of mine. If they are of like-mind and are interested or active in the space in which I operate, it makes sense to connect with them rather than keep my network closed and exclusive. That, along with a strategy of following up in-person meetings, telephone chats and conversations on Twitter with invitations to connect with people, has in turn seen my LinkedIn network grow markedly. This has added momentum to my profile-building activities overall — my platform, as it were — and provides me an effective two-way channel to reach and communicate with a strictly business audience. Importantly, it’s an audience that has opted-in to my network, making it doubly effective because they have proactively bought into my thoughts and ideas — my brand.

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