LinkedIn is a lot of different things to a lot of different users. Arguably the most powerful place to make connections with business owners, executives, decision makers, recruiters, job seekers and the like. With more than 610 million users, many of whom are executives and decision makers, it is a very powerful but congested venue for building relationships and credibility. This is where having a basic understanding of LinkedIn SEO is very useful.
Building relationships is nothing new to sales and business. Social media marketing is. To be able to build long-lasting virtual business relationships over the web is hard. Some would say impossible. I don’t agree.
You’ve finally built a relationship with a potential customer and are getting pretty chummy. Thinking a social media customer connection is a great next step you start in with… “Hey let’s connect” you say. “Great!, LinkedIn?” says the customer. “No, I was thinking Facebook networking.” you blurt out. Silence [cricket noise]. Things just got awkward. Why?
Somewhere along the way sales professionals thought they had found the infamous “silver bullet” for sales success. “If I just Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin I will have thousands of sales easily!” Question… when has marketing using email, faxing, or mailers ever worked that way? Isn’t social media the same? You’re return will always be fractions of a percent for the effort. Always has, always will be… and you know what? That’s o.k. So, Is social media a waste of time?