LinkedIn success: Overcoming myths and fears
Despite all the facts and stats that we covered in the first article of this series, proving the benefits of LinkedIn, you may still be sceptical.
In this post, we unearth some of the common myths and underlying fears surrounding the platform and set your mind at ease.
IT’S JUST A JOB-POSTING SITE
As we mentioned before, LinkedIn is used by hundreds of thousands of professionals. It has excellent search and filter facilities to help you find who you’re looking for. It is a huge network of individuals actively seeking to increase their relationships. It is commonly used to search for new business partnerships. These are wonderful opportunities for you to impress!
IT’S TOO OPEN
Many people fear the transparency of social media platforms. Specifically for LinkedIn, they worry that competitors will be able to look up who your customers are, and that customers will be able to see your supply chain.
On the first point, you can quickly and easily prevent other users from seeing who your connections are by simply changing your privacy settings so that only you can see your connections. This does mean that your connections will be able to see any that you share, but as long as you don’t connect with your competitors then you’ll be safe.
As for customers being able to see your supply chain, if this is critical to keep secret then simply steer clear of connecting with any of your suppliers. This way, your customers will never need to know.
IT’S FOR INDIVIDUALS, NOT COMPANIES
There are two strands to the defence of this argument. Firstly, LinkedIn has an excellent ‘company page’ facility which provides a neat, concise outline of your company and enables live feeds and updates. Other users can follow the company page to keep up to date with all of these. In addition, they can quickly see all employees of the company from this same page.
Secondly and more importantly, isn’t business all about individuals anyway? As Richard Branson says: ‘Business is about people, people, people.’ It’s a commonly held belief amongst successful businesspeople that transactions are carried out based on the emotional connection between people.
Therefore, it makes sense that your people (who will have imbibed your culture) should be representing your company both online, on the phone and face to face. This is one of the reasons LinkedIn is such a resounding success story.
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