5 Thoughts on Using LinkedIn for Business.

Five Thoughts About LinkedIn.

For me, LinkedIn is still a great place to spend time building my business network & customer base. As a long time contributor to LinkedIn, it seems to me that many small businesses, start-up companies and not-for-profit organizations are losing sight of why they are there. I am also seeing businesses being lead into practices which could be detrimental for them, both by LinkedIn themselves and by Social Media "Marketeers". I would like to provide you some food-for-thought on why LinkedIn is certainly not about chasing "profile views" or "rankings".

1. LinkedIn is a Professional Networking tool, a Discussion forum and a B2B/B2C meeting place. LinkedIn is not a competition.

2. Investing time and effort here for purposes of increasing artificial numbers such as Profile Views is just not what its about, in my view. Chasing profile views on LinkedIn does not equate to the bottom line. 

3. Social Media Marketing is not Social Sales. Unless you are converting your time & effort into outcomes you might be wasting your time. As for most businesses, for me time is always accountable money, so LinkedIn can be detrimental if wielded incorrectly.

4. Social Media and Networks come with advanced and quantitative measuring tools. I believe that LinkedIn is not a social science, but an analytical one.

5. The rules are the rules and we all have a contractual obligation to the User Agreement we all agreed to by being there. Many users, moderators and aficionados have lost sight of the principles and foundations on which LinkedIn is based. I believe that we all need to go back-to-basics and revisit LinkedIn's Code of Practice for ourselves, including LinkedIn's employees.


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