Some Recent LinkedIn Answers

Question: Seeking your opinions on MySpace and Facebook

I am writing a paper for a conference, in which I compare MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn with respect to professionals who may be using those services. And as I have a profile with each service, I have some observations and opinions I can work with, but I know I'm not smart enough to see everything.

So I want to hear from you. I know you use LinkedIn, or you wouldn't be reading this question. LOL If you HAVE a MySpace profile, and/or if you HAVE a Facebook profile, I would like to know (a) whether you think they are advancing your business or career in any way, and (b) what you particularly like (or dislike) about those services.

For purposes of my own research, I'm not particularly interested in opinions not directly related to the questions above, and I'm not particularly interested in the opinions of those not having profiles. But I recognize if you're one of those people you may need to talk anyway, so have at thee. LOL

Non-trivial, on-topic answers will get an "acknowledgement" credit on the paper -- which I'm sure will TOTALLY make your day. Woo-hoo! LOL

My Answer

I have a Myspace account (well a couple of them... one personal and one professional) and a Facebook account and they've both been helpful to me professionally. It's not easy to make it happen though. You have to develop good content, build links to your accounts, actually be involved and social on the site, and it helps if you do some other promotion whether it's online or in more traditional media (print, radio, TV).

I have a Myspace page focused on my business that has done very well with organic rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN and has driven traffic and sales leads to my web site. A while back I wrote a blog post on my Myspace page about going to Milwaukee for a few days and ended up getting a request for a meeting while I was in town from a younger entrepreneur.

My Facebook profile hasn't been quite as strong professionally, but it is useful for keeping connected with younger professionals that aren't into LinkedIn. If you use the Groups feature, I think you can extract some good business value as well assuming you can promote your group enough to gain some traction. The other tool Facebook gives you that I think is too often overlooked is the super targeted PPC available. You can cut down Facebook's US network of 20+ million people to just people at a particular school with a particular major, or just people between certain ages in a certain town. It's not free but it is very cool.

Question: Can business pages on facebook join groups? Can they invite people to become fans?

My Answer

Unfortunately business fan pages can't join groups, probably because they're pretty close to a group to begin with. You can invite people though.

On the right hand side of the page there is a text link to "Share with Friends" and there is also a "share" button on the very bottom of the page in the right hand corner you can use to promote/invite people.

The other thing I've done to promote things like this is to add the URL to e-mail newsletters and relevant web sites. You can also use Facebook's PPC platform to promote a fan page if you are ok with spending some money.

Question: What do you think about the newly announced Google "Automatic Matching" feature?

It's been widely reported even though technically it is in beta. http://www.google.com/search?q=google+Automatic+Matching It's a way to expand your reach and spend the rest of your budget by allowing Google to find matches that go beyond broad or extended. I won't share my opinion, but I'm writing about it in an upcoming column and would love to hear what the LinkedIn community has to say.

My Answer

That is one of those "helpful" features that I turn off immediately. I really don't like spending my client's money just to spend money. I'm not anti-broad matching, the public is incredibly creative when it comes to creating a search query, but deliberate guessing by a computer in order to make sure all of my budget gets spent does not sit well with me. Adwords is most profitable to users when tightly controlled.
Links: http://www.smsrd.com/2008/02/google-budget-optimizer-house-always.html