Positives and Negatives for Business: LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been growing steadily over the last few years and now in 2017, is one of the biggest social media networks around. LinkedIn has been purposely set up for, and provides a great deal of exposure for a variety of businesses across all sectors and industries. It has been designed specifically to connect your business or private profile with others in your industry or others hoping to become a part of it. Everyone agrees LinkedIn even is a social network for business as its main purpose is for networking with other professionals. As it has been designed with these specific purposes, small business owners generally join LinkedIn with the hope of expanding their ventures and creating new connections that could prove beneficial.

Positives

So we will start with the positives of LinkedIn.

Staying Up To Date

One of the major benefits of being connected with other professionals in your field across the network is that it keeps you informed of any changes in your industry and indicates upcoming trends or big ideas. It provides great space for sharing experiences and advice among not just other businesses like you own but also your industries top names and most well known brands.

SEO

Another huge benefit of LinkedIn comes in the form of SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines use profiles to bring businesses into search query results. It’s the perfect tool to give a business more exposure without spending more cash on search engine advertising campaigns.

Useful Information

The last positive we will give for LinkedIn is simply that it allows you to post a great amount of information about your company or business. Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn can inform your connections and the public of all major data and information that you want them to know. It will also give you the professional profiles of the individuals associated with the business – from employees to investors. Access to this type of specific data and information allows users to easily find potential partners or recruit new employees, saving you a lot of time, energy, and resources.

Negatives

For all of its positives there are inevitably some negatives.

Creation and Maintenance

Once you are up and running and happy with your business profile LinkedIn can save you a lot of time, but getting started takes a while and requires a lot of time and work to get your connections flowing and conversations started. To get started and begin to establish yourself in your industry you will be relying on others to accept your connection requests and you will spend a lot of time searching and scouting for these people on the network.

As with Facebook if you have something to say you can post on LinkedIn and people expect to see posts from the leaders in their fields so to push this reputation for yourself you will need to spend a lot of time researching and creating posts to attract people to your personal ideas as well as the ethos and missions of your business. It’s worth keeping in mind that LinkedIn is a platform for connections and conversations, so approach these tasks with the outcome of building business relationships.

Spam

One of the major negatives is the way LinkedIn is used as an advertising megaphone for spammers so once your profile is loaded by contact information, prepare yourself for the large amount if useless advertising making its way to your inbox.

Conclusion

Overall, LinkedIn is a solid platform for businesses and individuals. If you are just getting started, keep these pros and cons in mind. If you do, your relationship and experience with LinkedIn will prove beneficial.