Why Ignoring LinkedIn Is A Bad Idea
Aug 31
With the huge popularity of Twitter and Facebook, poor LinkedIn has kind of fallen to the wayside. The question is… are you making a big mistake my not including LinkedIn in your social medial strategy?
Last week, I wrote a post comparing Google Plus and Facebook. Facebook is the king of the mountain, but Google is gaining ground. Last time I checked, Facebook had over 750 million users. Think about that for a second. There are only 312 million people in the entire U.S. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world! Everyone is on Facebook, but not too many are on LinkedIn – so why bother?
The biggest reason is the audience. LinkedIn has a very different audience than Facebook. Facebook is much more personal. First day of school pictures, birthday announcements, divorce updates – whatever. LinkedIn is more geared towards businesses. You won’t find too many people playing Farmville on LinkedIn. With over 100 million users, that makes LinkedIn a pretty big group of potential contacts for your business – so why not add them to your marketing efforts. With programs like Tweetdeck, you can update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all at the same time – so it is really zero extra effort.
Take the photography business as an example. If your clients are stay at home moms with small children, Facebook is obviously the place to be. That is where you will find them in droves. However, what if you want to promote business headshots? You would be better served trying to reach those types of clients via LinkedIn.
There is no perfect social media platform – they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The great part is – you don’t have to choose. Incorporate all of them and then track the results. You might be surprised how many people locate you through the other channels. Like I said before, it is only a minimal amount of extra effort – so why not?
Has LinkedIn worked for you? Let me know what you think!
“With programs like Tweetdeck, you can update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all at the same time – so it is really zero extra effort.”
I tend to stay away from cross-posting social media accounts, especially for business. While it might save time (all of 2-3 minutes, perhaps), the formats are so different a lot is lost in translations.
To maximize your social media marketing efforts you have to understand the demographics (target audience) and also have a effective plan in place. Not completely utilizing each of your accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) is also not utilizing an effective social media marketing strategy.
Cross-posting doesn’t account for hashtags, generated images, and character limits…it also ignores the remarkably different demographics inhabiting each social network. With different audiences, your message should be geared differently also.
It is not enough to simply have a presence on social media to be effective…you must also have a solid social media marketing plan in place. Stay away from crossposting — most, if not all of the time
Thanks for your input Chris. I agree- personally working all the social media angles is definitely the best policy. However, there are tons of people who neglect venues like LinkedIn because they feel like they are spending too much time on social media as it is. I guess those are the people I was targeting with this post.
I think some sort of presence is better than no presence at all – at least it is a good starting point.
That’s a very nice article. I also believe in addressing different audience in different ways, what Chris I believe was trying to say. Posting the same thing on all your accounts isn’t very helpful, especially since there might be people following you on all of them.
I wonder though what’s gonna happen in the future, for me this whole social media stuff is like a bubble that eventually is going to pop. People will get tired of all the exposure and try the old fashioned privacy for a while. That’s just my opinion, what do you think?
Yeah- you figure it can’t continue to grow like this. I think people will eventually burn out on the whole thing- it is just information overload right now.