So one of my actions from the Northern VA Collaboration was sparked by an inspiring talk from Nicola Little of Sparkle Communications who was talking about LinkedIn.
Her presentation showed how by using only a freebie profile and 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn she had generated a massive amount of business in just 1 month.
I’m afraid I’m a LinkedIn skeptic… I did give poor Nicola a hard time, but she stood her ground – it worked for her, she is evangelical about its uses for all small businesses. So I’m putting my money where my mouth is… This is live data from my profile, and I’ll be doing a little bit every day from 1st June to see if I can replicate the results.
Why I am skeptical? Well one of the reasons I hate LinkedIn is because it’s forever changing stuff. I used to use it for the groups, which I networked in – but more and more these are full of spammy stuff and people therefore only digest these once a week by email, if they even bother to register for email alerts at all. I also used to use LinkedIn to sort my contacts into groups so I could message all the VAs re: the VA survey or some interesting news etc – but LinkedIn changed this so you could only have a maximum of 50 people in each group (presumably to stop spamming) and they also changed the options so that it was harder to organise your contacts when they asked to connect, so mine are pretty much unsorted these days! But fundamentally, the reason why I’m super skeptical about finding clients on LinkedIn: My target is time poor, I really doubt they are spending much time hanging out on LinkedIn!
When I did use it for marketing it was several years ago when LinkedIn was in its infancy and my goal was to connect primarily with legal eagles who might outsource their typing – what ended up happening is that I had loads of meetings/coffee and chats with people but none of them converted to clients. (I’m generally pretty good at converting clients – we have a ratio of about 20:1 cold leads converting to actual clients, so I know my targeting is spot on and that my offer is pretty compelling for those leads). It backed up my initial suspicion that people who are hanging out on LinkedIn are mostly time rich… and therefore not my target.
The other annoyance I have with LinkedIn is its insistence that I can only have 1 profile… Which drives me bonkers. Yeah – so I have 2 business pages – one for my own VA business and one for SVA, but invariably VAs click on my business page and try to download marketing materials, click on links and generally screw up all my marketing data for client leads… Not only does that cost me money (because my staff follow up these leads!) but it also skews all the data about what real clients are interested in because I’ve got 500-odd VAs clicking on the links… I suspect I’m going to have to do a major cull of my contacts on LinkedIn to solve this issue!
But let’s be fair – I haven’t really given it much thought for probably about 5 or 6 years! Things change and I’m open to being proved wrong…
So here’s where we start:
Connections: 786
Business from LinkedIn: £0
Costs spent: £0 (I’m also including my time in this as that’s how I assess all my marketing)