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Is LinkedIn really all that it’s cracked up to be?

The Conquest of LinkedIn – Last Little BitsLinkedIn, inmaps, Profile Page, Resume, Network, Meeting Offline, Facelift, Last Little Bits, Q & A, Social Media Specialist

The Conquest of LinkedIn – Last Little Bits

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on April 28, 2022

Let’s Look at the Conquest of LinkedIn and its Last Little Bits

What sort of last little bits? Now, there’s more to LinkedIn than what I’ve already covered. And, truth be told, the number and diversity of add-ons and features is only going to keep growing. As with any other truly viable online business, LinkedIn keeps adding new bells and whistles, and constantly A/B testing. It is already a far different site from the one I joined a few years ago. And, by the way, I have never gone Premium. I think it’s a waste of money, particularly for job seekers who are often watching every dime.

However, there is an appreciable difference between making and keeping your page lively and interesting, versus making it too busy. I don’t think that you need everything. Really. I think a bit of restraint is in order.

Connections List

Your connections list is not as granular as it once was, possibly a function of LinkedIn getting larger. After all, by 2025, LinkedIn is projected to have over a billion users. Hence the demands of data, and server speed and size, mean that they aren’t going to give you as many opportunities to add metadata about your connections.

Instead, the site offers groups. Create a group, and invite likely people to join it. Your High School’s graduating class, or your sorority chapter might be good choices, as your High School is probably already represented and your sorority might be as well. But these groups provide more specificity. Of course, not everyone you invite will join one of these groups, but it’s worth a shot. Still, LinkedIn is no longer trying to be like a CRM system. That’s, I feel, for the better, as it gives the site more focus as a networking platform.

Events

Another tool that is gone is events. A pity, in some ways. But again, the site is looking to focus itself better. That includes eliminating some of the fat.

Following a Company

LinkedIn provides the ability to follow a company. If you are in charge of your company’s LinkedIn profile, you can help to stimulate this information stream by listing comings and goings, promotions and transfers. Got an event going on, with an interesting or attractive look to it? Take a picture and post it!

Profile Page Shortcut

The shortcut to your profile page is an easy way to make yourself stand out a bit more. Just select a reasonable shortcut for yourself. Mine is my last name, because it’s unique.

Last Little Bits on Your Profile Photograph

The last, and perhaps most important bit is your profile picture. To add, or not to add? I say, add it. It’s not like you’re going to hide your race, your age, or your gender if you meet someone. So you may as well come forward so that, if you meet in person, they can recognize you. Use a recent, clear headshot, and for God’s sake, smile! Look professional and approachable, and try to keep it current. That reminds me; I should probably update mine.

Last Little Bits and Some Takeaways

There will undoubtedly be more changes  and last little bits as LinkedIn dreams up new ways to connect business persons. Perhaps virtual reality is in its future. Stay tuned – I may blog more about LinkedIn and its last little bits as it continues to reinvent and improve itself.

LinkedIn is constantly changing. These might end up not being the last little bits after all.

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Giving Your LinkedIn Profile A Facelift

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on March 24, 2022

What’s this About Giving Your LinkedIn Profile A Facelift?

Dahling, you need a facelift! This post is a riff on an old article from Social Media Today: 6 Tips for giving your LinkedIn profile a facelift.

I liked this article and recognize that it was designed to be a straightforward beginner’s set of tips, but there is more that could be done. There usually is.

Use a Profile Photograph

I absolutely agree. I realize there are people who are shy or who feel that they don’t photograph well. But the truth is, most of us on LinkedIn don’t care.

Unless you are looking for a modeling or an acting gig, your appearance does not and should not matter. That is, so long as you are neat and presentable, and are in business attire. Head shots and  images up to about the middle of your chest are best. You don’t need a full-length body shot.

I also think that keeping a picture off your profile because you don’t want to reveal your race, gender or age is somewhat wrongheaded. After all, what are you going to do if you actually get an interview with a company (and not necessarily directly through LinkedIn)?

Send a proxy in your stead, a la Cyrano de Bergerac? That’s kinda silly, dontcha think?

As for me, people online are going to figure out that I am female, they will get a pretty good handle on my age and my religion and if they look a bit, they’ll even see pictures of me when I weighed nearly 350 pounds. And I embrace those things and don’t try to hide them. Your ideas may differ, but I don’t, personally, see the value in hiding such things.

And if an employer is going to pass me by because I’m no longer 21, or not Asian, or too short or whatever, then I don’t want to work for that employer, anyway. And… that’s probably illegal, anyway.

Use a Vanity URL

On LinkedIn, you can get them to make you a specific URL for your profile, rather than just accept the computer-generated one. Not surprisingly, I think this is a great idea. This happens to be mine. You can get a bit of an SEO bounce if you use a vanity URL. It is easy and it is free, and it is considerably more memorable.

Plus, if you wish, it’s a good thing to put on a business card or a resume, or even into a signature line in email.

For a Facelift, Use a Headline

Personally, I find these weird, but that may be just me. For me, just my job title seems to be fine, as it evokes (currently) not only what I do but the industry I am in right now. I’ve always, personally, found that titles like Terrific Social Media Manager or Experienced Fry Cook just seem odd. But that may be me.

Try it—but I’d recommend doing so as a more or less controlled experiment. If it’s not working after, say, six months, I recommend rethinking it.

Update Your Email Settings

If you’re open to receiving job openings, make sure that your profile says so. And if not, make sure you say that instead. People won’t necessarily follow your requirements in this area, but some will. And it can serve as an indirect means of indicating you might be interested in making a move if the timing and the circumstances were right.

Make Your Profile Public

Personally, I think that the only time your profile should be private is in the first five seconds after you’ve created it. Then again, I have had an online persona since 1997, and find it easy to share a lot of things.

Of course not everyone feels this way, but it seems to be kind of useless to have a LinkedIn profile if you don’t want to share it with anyone. Networking, which is what LinkedIn is all about, is, in part, about going outside your comfort zone and meeting new people. This is not like Facebook where, potentially, the pictures of you drinking in 1963 could come back to haunt you.

This is a gathering of professionals. Any employer upset if you have an online presence on LinkedIn is not only not with the times. They are being thoroughly unrealistic. Employees look for better opportunities all the time. Wise employers recognize and accept that. Denying someone access to LinkedIn, or being upset by an employee’s presence therein, is misplaced.

So go out there and fix your profile! And give it a facelift!

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The Conquest of LinkedIn – Meeting Offline

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on October 5, 2021

The Conquest of LinkedIn – Meeting Offline

Meeting Offline. Oh. My. God. You want me to do what?!??!

Go offline. Yes, I really and truly want you to do this. I want you to go out and meet real-live, honest to goodness human beings. You know, members of your own species.

But, but, but, I hear you saying, why am I on on online networking site in the first place? Isn’t it to build a network online?

Well, sure it is. But nowhere in there is the word only living. Online, yes. But not exclusively there.

Not by a long shot.

Traditional vs. New-Style Networking

Traditional networking involves fairly formalized, ritualized meetings between job seekers and employees of companies where the job seekers wish to work.

Here’s the drill: the job seeker gets an introduction via a friend, or a friend of a friend, and goes to the contact’s office. The job seeker brings his or her resume and the two of them chat, maybe for a half an hour or so. And the job seeker leaves the resume and, if he or she is good at follow up, sends a nice thank-you note. The contact may or may not respond, promising to get in touch if something comes up, or if the contact thinks of someone else for the job seeker to talk to. And the cycle either continues, or it dies on the vine. And so it goes.

LinkedIn Changes That

With LinkedIn, the drill differs. Here is what I found to be helpful. Your mileage may vary, or you may come up with something else. So, instead,

  1. You find a person you want to meet. They may be in your industry, or an industry you want to get into. Or they are in a company where you think you’d like to work. Make sure they are close enough to you that getting together is feasible.
  2. And you ask them to link to you.
  3. You do this with about 19 other people – this is a numbers game, and not everyone will say yes. My experience has been, out of over 200 of these, only one person has flat out said no. However, over half either ignored my link request or just never got around to it (I have even met some of these people under other circumstances – it’s not hostility that keeps them from linking to me, it’s that they are busy and processing far too much information at any given one time). So, give yourself better odds. Mine have been about 45% have said yes to the link request.

More

  1. Someone says yes. Great! Send them a note, saying something like, Thank you for linking with me. Would it be possible to meet briefly for coffee? I am interested in going into ___/working at ___ company/working as a ____ and can see that you have done that, and I hope that you have a few tips you can share. Thanks!
  2. Repeat this with anyone else who’s agreed to link with you, pursuant to your initial request. My experience has been that, out of the people who linked to me, I contacted about 55% of them to ask them to coffee (for the others, I realized they were either too geographically remote or they let me know they could link but were busy, e. g. they were new parents) and then, out of that group, about 25% of those actually got as far as scheduled meetings. Hence my success rate was that I met with about 6% of the people I initially wrote to.
  3. So block off an hour or two, but tell your guest that you only want 20 minutes of their time. Hence that way, if the meeting goes over, you’re covered.

Yet More!

  1. Don’t bring your resume! Instead, bring either a laptop or your smartphone or a pen and paper. And bring a paper list of companies you’re targeting. Because if the conversation flags, you can always ask your guest what he or she thinks of those companies, or if your guest knows anyone at any of them.
  2. Furthermore, have your guest select the date, time and place. In addition, give a couple of choices of dates or places for meeting offline, if your guest is having trouble deciding and
  3. Offer to pay for coffee. Even if you’ve been out of work for a long time, most people are sensitive enough, and realize you’re probably watching your funds. However, you must ask.

Meeting Offline Specifics

As for the meeting itself, make it whatever you want it to be. And if the conversation flags, remember it’s only 20 minutes out of your life. So you can always claim a prior appointment. However, if the conversation goes well, be sensitive to your guest’s time – just ask – do you need to go? And then just follow their lead.

So follow up with a thank-you email, and send a note every few months or so, to maintain the connection. Just send along an article or blog post that you think that your guest might enjoy. And it is also a courtesy – although not strictly necessary – to follow them on Twitter and/or read and comment on their blog, if any.

So will it work? It can. I did not meet with a lot of people in terms of percentages. However, the people I met with gave me very good information, and introduced me to others (or informed me of upcoming events) which helped me out even more. And it also was incredibly helpful to me in my work, as I had a good, strong network to draw on when we had events and needed to fill a room.

This kind of activity will certainly get you out and about, and give you exposure to people in your current or future field. Finally, meeting offline counts as making a job contact for virtually any Department of Unemployment.

There, now, meeting offline wasn’t so bad, was it?

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The Conquest of LinkedIn – Your Network

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on July 8, 2021

The Conquest of LinkedIn – Your Network

You know that your network is important. Don’t you?

So you’ve decided to join LinkedIn. Or, maybe you were pushed into it. No matter.

And you’ve even posted your resume. That’s great! Now what? What do you do about your network?

You may have already received an invitation or two to connect. Or you may be starting to realize that having a resume out there isn’t enough. You’re right. You need to forge bonds with others.

So, who should you link to?

The short answer is: everyone.

The long answer is also: everyone.

I am not kidding here, folks.

A Network: Two Schools of Thought

Now, there are people who will disagree with me, and such is their prerogative. However, the truth is, when you’re looking for a job, you tend to need all the networking help you can get. Your dentist. And your former college roommate. Your brother-in-law.

You see, a traditional network goes beyond just former colleagues and classmates. It branches out and eventually begins to include people who are friends of friends. The same is true online.

Finding Connections Among People You Know

So one thing you can do is, open up your address book to LinkedIn and allow them to send a networking invitation to the people in it. Your present and former colleagues are probably either already on LinkedIn or are contemplating joining. Most will be receptive to your invitation. And as for your family, they will probably also be fairly receptive to linking.

Even if your cousin is geographically remote and in a very different industry from yours, that does not mean that the connection is a complete waste of time. As for the other names in your book (your babysitter, perhaps), use your own judgment. Personally, I think you should ask everyone. But I can see where someone might balk at asking everyone they’ve ever known to link to them.

And that’s all right, but you may have unnecessarily cut yourself off from potential opportunities. So, what’s next?

Growing Your Connections List

Beyond the people you know, there are not only the people they know, but also people who you want to link to but you don’t know them yet.

What? You don’t want to meet new people?

Then, with all due respect, why are you on a networking website to begin with?

I don’t mean to sound flip. But the concept behind networking is to, well, network. So that means you need to meet people you don’t know, and go outside your comfort zone a little bit.

Objections?

But, you say, they’ll know my name and address. Your name, yes. As for your address – no, not unless you’ve got it in your online resume. And you shouldn’t have it there, although at least your general location can most likely be inferred, given where much of your network lives. Plus, people may be able to figure out your general location from your employment history.

Yet to that I say, so what? Your address is on your mailbox, and in the telephone directory. It can be found in tax records and voter registration rolls.

It is not hard to find. And you are neither hiding it nor better preserving your identity or your privacy in any way by not opening yourself up to this kind of linking.

So, link. Indiscriminately? Not exactly. Avoid known spammers. And, if someone you’ve linked to turns out to be a spammer, drop and report them. You don’t need to be tarred by that.

LIONs and the Like

What’s a LION? It’s a LinkedIn Open Networker. This used to signal to people that you were open to networking with anyone but a spammer. However, it’s become a kind of shorthand for spamming these days. This doesn’t mean you can’t open yourself to connections.

But the term LION has essentially become obsolete. Spammers really ruin it for everyone, eh?

Targeting Connections at Target Companies

Who else? Try connecting with people working at companies you’re targeting. And, if it’s a very large company, try narrowing your connection requests to just people in the departments, and/or with the job titles or descriptions, that you are directly targeting.

And, just in case there is absolutely no other way to whittle those people down, go with alma maters and/or geography. Yes, even if you intend to work from home 100% of the time. Even if everyone in the company does the same. Because someone who lives anywhere near you, or went to your school, has a built-in hook where you can hang your networking hat, as it were.

The Art of Asking for a Connection to Your Network

How do you ask for a connection? There is a ready-made note that LinkedIn pops up for you. It’s fine, but you should modify it. First, call the person by name! I don’t want to positively respond to a generic note – do you? So, call me by name! What else? Make sure you thank the person.

Anything else?

One last thing – tell the person why you want to link with them. It can be brief, just one sentence is fine.

You want to link to me because of my work at a particular company? Then say something like:

I’m interested in linking to you because of your work at ___ company.

Want to link to me because of a job I’ve had? Then write something like:

I’d like to link to you because I’m looking to become a ___, which I see you’ve already done.

Understandably, these notes are not too terribly exciting, but they are short and to the point and they get the job done. Don’t overthink it and don’t over-communicate. You’re a networker and possibly also a job seeker. You’re not a jilted ex.

Downsides

Be aware that, if you are dinged enough times by people who say they don’t know you, you’re going to have a much harder time trying to link later. So, proactively go out to link with the following people:

  • Friends and family
  • Current and former colleagues
  • Known open networkers and
  • People in companies you want to get into, but only if you send them personal notes and do so sparingly.

Who should you allow to link to you? That’s easy – anyone but a known spammer.

Grow your network. Here’s an area where size really does matter. Quality matters, of course, but quantity is going to open a lot of doors as well. Like it or not, a large network makes a favorable impression. So go plant those seeds!

Oh, and the more connections of any type you have (even second and third tier), the more different ways your profile can be served up to other people. You know, people who have jobs or knowledge that you want.

Next: Offline Meetings.

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The Conquest of LinkedIn – Your Resume

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on February 11, 2021

The Conquest of LinkedIn – Your Resume

LinkedIn is almost a corporate version of Facebook, a serious social networking site, a place to plonk your resume amidst all the chatter. If you are looking for a job, you need to be on LinkedIn. In case you might be looking for work again some time in your lifetime, you need to be on LinkedIn.

If you might ever be called upon to professionally recommend someone, or professionally network together people from disparate times of your life (such as a college classmate and a person you know from your last job), you need to be on LinkedIn. And if you ever need to showcase your credentials to a mass audience, for any reason whatsoever, you need to be on LinkedIn. And the cornerstone of it all is your resume.

Who Should Be on LinkedIn?

And if there’s anyone else over the age of eighteen left in the United States, or potentially on the planet, chances are pretty good that they need to be on LinkedIn as well.

Why?

All of the aforementioned are perfectly good reasons to be on LinkedIn, but there’s one more. It puts together all of your professional data into one safe, trusted and uniform online package. Hence LinkedIn, like your resume itself, gives Hiring Managers a well-presented collection of information about you as a worker.

But that is if you take the time to make a complete, compelling and well thought out profile. If not, well, then LinkedIn can become a fast ticket to oblivion.

Hence, you need to put together a cogent profile, and the first place to start is with your resume. It will be similar, but not identical, to the resume you provide directly to Hiring Managers.

Improving Your LinkedIn Resume

So here are some tips for making your LinkedIn resume as good as it can be:

  • List all of your major jobs, no matter how long ago you did them, so long as the company (or a successor) is still in business. This is counter to what is normally put into a regular resume. On LinkedIn, you don’t really have a length issue. But don’t list as many companies as possible in order to make linking easier with a greater number of people—save those for the projects section, so your resume can look clean and not go back more than maybe 10 years, 15 on the outside
  • Place key words and phrases in your job descriptions. People hunting through LinkedIn are most likely to be using the search feature, so you need to have words and phrases listed that people will be using to search for someone like you. E. g. if you’re looking for work as a Business Analyst, don’t just include the title – also include the fact that you did (assuming this is accurate) requirements gathering, which is a main Business Analyst task across multiple disciplines

More Tips for Your Resume

  • List the different types of software you’ve used, with versions. This is, again, to make your profile come up in searches. E. g. if you used Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, make sure they are listed that way.
  • Just like with a standard resume, use action words and well-defined metrics to show what you did in your career. “Worked on the Smith project” is nowhere near as impressive as “Performed quantitative analysis; these recommendations saved the company 20% of the estimated costs on the Smith project”. Numbers are impressive. Use them.
  • Make sure your company listings jibe with what’s already on LinkedIn. That is, let the software give you choices (if any) for the company name. If you worked for a very large company (say, Fidelity Investments), the company name is already on LinkedIn. Don’t type it in yourself. This will automatically make it easier for you to link to everyone else who has listed Fidelity Investments as a current or past employer, and
  • Feel free to add more than one current employer, including any volunteer work you may be doing. Again, this will add to the ease with which you can link to others.
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The Conquest of LinkedIn – Your Profile Page

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on January 19, 2021

To Continue the Conquest of LinkedIn, Let’s Look at Your Profile Page

What’s up with your profile page?

You’re doing it. And you’ve got your resume up. You’re answering questions. And you’re joining groups. You’re even meeting people offline. But you aren’t getting an enormous number of invitations to connect.

Or, perhaps, you’re blogging and tweeting. But you’re not getting a lot of readers in either medium. And you’d love to get some of your LinkedIn buddies to read some of your stuff. Maybe you want to use your writing and social media skills as a part of your overall job search strategy.

So the most obvious place to look, and to fix, is your Profile page.

Just like with a resume, a news story, or even if you were trying to sell your home, it pays to spruce up the first thing people see. Hence special care should be taken, as this is your first (and it may very well be your only) chance to make an impression.

There are any number of things you can do to assure that this impression is a positive one.

Driving Traffic

And, you can even use it to help you drive a little traffic to your own website and/or blog. Here’s how:

  • Make sure that you make use of all available fields, and customize these as you are able.
  • Next, list your blog.
  • and I also recommend adding Twitter.

If another social media platform will fit better, then add your details there as well, such as YouTube for videographers.

More You Can Do With Your Profile Page

So assuming that your resume has been integrated in its entirety, your next task should be to update the summary and specialties sections in your profile page. First of all, the specialties section is essentially just for keywords, so load them up.

However, the summary section should be more grammatical. So don’t make it an old-fashioned and generic personal statement. Instead, highlight your main differences here.

Pix, Pictures, Images, You Get the Idea

Include a current, clear, professional image of yourself. And once that image becomes, say, about five, eight, ten or so years old, replace it with a newer one.

URL City, Baby!

LinkedIn won’t give you a nice URL unless you essentially make your own. But they offer instructions for customization. After all, it is absolutely in LinkedIn’s best interests for you to put your LinkedIn URL on, say, your resume, your business cards, etc.

And most people won’t do that if the URL is breathtakingly ugly.

It’s a very, very easy thing to do, and there is truly no excuse not to polish your URL.

Posts and Takeaways

Yes, you can add posts to your profile page (a feature which seems to come and go). But you don’t have to. This isn’t Facebook, so a continual stream of statuses (statii?) is not expected.

Finally, with a little polish, your front door (profile page) can look mighty inviting to all.

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InMaps – Visualize Your Network on LinkedIn

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on July 21, 2016

A Look at InMaps – Visualize Your Network on LinkedIn

InMaps were cool. But alas, they are no more. LinkedIn, like other social media sites, is a lot more about advertising these days.

Let’s say you’ve got a nice, growing network on LinkedIn.

Hurray! Now let’s say that it’s large enough that you’re unsure of how it’s all trending. After all, what if your network is mainly people who used to work at Fidelity but you want to get into Prudential instead? How can you see how things are shaking out?

Or maybe you want to get a handle on job titles that you’re seeing – what if most of your network consists of tradespeople in your area, rather than people who might actually be able to find you something?

If you’re an accountant, a network full of hairdressers and landscape contractors is lovely but it might not be really doing it for you, eh?

Here’s where InMaps came in.

What InMaps Did

Essentially, what LinkedIn was doing is, instead of geographically mapping your connections, they were mapping other meaningful relationships among all of those people. So instead you could see things like job titles that frequently come up, and other connections. These included who used to work where.

If you’d worked in several places (like I have) you might have seen one former employer dominate, particularly if you’d just left a particular role.

After all, when Hachette Book Group and I parted ways, suddenly I connected to the other seventeen or so people who were being outsourced. There was a bit of urgency to getting connections, and we wanted to maintain friendships. I’d had to dig a bit in order to find former colleagues further back in my career.

And, by the way, FYI, this does behoove one to try to make connections. These connections would be both during employment and to reach back to older connections. This is because the natural push to connect might not come about if you’re thinking about a job you held twenty years ago, long before the existence of LinkedIn.

The Downside

It would take a while for LinkedIn to generate an InMap. Particularly if you’ve got a lot of connections. This was a feature that never really got out of Beta, so that was totally understandable.

But here was the InMap for a woman named Leslie Gotch Zarelli. So this should give something of an idea about how the overall pattern looked. Her InMap (I would have posted mine, but LinkedIn never generated one) was dominated by general areas like Legal. Plus she had probably a former employer or two, and what appeared to be some job duties.

More information was on LinkedIn. LinkedIn discontinued the service in 2015 and never really found a replacement for it. So your contacts now are static. A pity, as it was a great idea. LinkedIn – people want this! Get mappin’!

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Online Advertising: Facebook Ads vs. Google AdWords vs. LinkedIn

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on July 31, 2014

Online Advertising: Facebook Ads vs. Google AdWords vs. LinkedIn

Social Media Today several years ago compared these three types of online advertising, namely: Facebook Ads vs. Google AdWords vs. LinkedIn. To find out who the top dog was, read on.

Google

Google’s ads got more expensive at the end, and their success often seemed to be hit or miss. Wide geographic ranges could give dramatic numbers but few results – narrowing things down geographically seemed to accompany a commensurate rise in click quality.

According to the article, Google advertising, “… works if you have a unique and popular product or service. The interface feels professional, with excellent reporting tools, great usability and many various options.”

Facebook

So, the Facebook advertising experience seemed to be the most satisfying to the writer of the article.  With a demographic and geographic focus (and fast service by Facebook support), you can credit ads with near-pinpoint accuracy.

But when speaking of Facebook, which is much more of a leisure time site than LinkedIn or Google is, the article stated, “(t)he secret is not to become too serious in your ads and keep them simple.”

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was seen as being great for ads intended to reach strictly professional audiences. However, the LinkedIn admin team took significantly longer to approve advertisements than their counterparts at Facebook and Google took.  Also, the reporting also had some serious restrictions. And it only offers a CSV file for download.

Facebook Ads vs. Google, Etc.

I agree with the conclusions drawn in the article – Facebook was overall the best, Google would be helpful for targeted ads for specific, unique or well-known products. And LinkedIn lagged, big time.

To my mind, this also dovetails well with these sites’ overall purposes. Facebook is where people go for socializing. And so it seems to work with ads in the same way that we view television commercials. Google and LinkedIn have other purposes. And so we are less likely to expect such a marriage of content and online advertising.

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