I’m someone who has always divided my social media into silos. LinkedIn and Twitter are for business and Facebook is for socializing.
Now obviously there are people who use Facebook to promote business. And I do have a FanPage. But it’s purpose is to provide another option for people to consume content. And if they want to read my blog or tweets on Facebook – who am I to stop them?
But your LinkedIn profile is a place where you probably don’t pay enough attention. Indeed if you ask around, you’ll hear a lot of the same thing – LinkedIn is for finding jobs.
But offering your services as an employee isn’t that much different from offering you services as a business. And LinkedIn is excellent for both.
The trick is to use it properly, and in a way that separates you from the roughly 160 million other LinkedIn profiles.
One of my clients – Kurt Shaver – is a corporate sales trainer with a special focus on social selling and LinkedIn. If you want to see a great LinkedIn profile – check his out.
He’s got videos, downloads and lot of other things that tell you right away that he knows what he’s talking about.
And while I’m not here to promote Kurt, he does have a tool that everyone with a LinkedIn account should check out. It’s a short anonymous self-assessment for your LinkedIn profile.
It’s 10 questions and at the end of it you’ll get redirected to a results page that shows the aggregate responses for EVERYONE who has taken it.
When you take the quiz, bookmark the results page and come back to it often. You’ll find some interesting trends as far as seeing where Linkedin users are in general – and learn what you can do to stand out as an individual or a business.
Also don’t feel shy about passing this around to other people you know. The more people who take the survey the more informative these results will be.