Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Creating a New Profile

Whether you are planning to use LinkedIn for personal career networking or consumer research, you are talking to a group of people who are focused almost solely on professional activities. Therefore, the most important first step is to look at your overall business strategy to see which social media marketing goals can be met by LinkedIn.

After you know your goals, you need to determine how to present yourself. This presentation is done by setting up a profile. You can set up only one profile on LinkedIn, so it needs to work for you in a variety of ways.

You also have the option of setting up a company page, but we recommend that unless you are specifically setting up a company page with several employees, you wait until you are more familiar with LinkedIn to do it. You want to be familiar with how things are done on LinkedIn before you promote yourself. If you have several employees who will be active online and need to get started right away, by all means do it.

Setting up your profile is deceptively easy. The quality of your LinkedIn profile is all-important. As with any career-related activity, you will be judged on a variety of measures, including the description of your previous successes and your willingness to help to others achieve their goals.

We recommend that you start with a profile to support the main goals you have and then revise as you go ...