Do You Actually Receive Value From LinkedIn?

After listening to How Slack Leverages Freemium to Add $1M in New Contract every 11 Days I considered a couple of points made by Fareed Mosavat, Lifecycle Product Manager at Slack.

My first takeaway?  The importance of a holistic view of your product and what it means to be a product-led company.

My second takeaway centers on “first value.”

Often, I think we consider value the outcome of the overall experience or engagement. However, “first value” implies there are touchpoints or a series of experiences that define the value of said product or service.

Interesting. So true.

Many people mention, opine, comment, and even rant about how much they DON’T like LinkedIn. Hah, I get it. There are days I feel their frustration. I’m part of a group of LinkedIn trainers that highlight their own annoyance with LinkedIn. There are so many comments I can’t keep up with the thread of the conversation. They need to devise workarounds and alternatives to accomplish what should be a simple activity on LinkedIn.

Beyond the lack of customer service, wonkiness, counterintuitive user experience, and unannounced changes, the question remains, “Do you receive value from LinkedIn?”

I submit you do.

Pre-LinkedIn your world and therefore your market share was smaller. You and your people, although you may have been well connected, were siloed and isolated. Your messaging while brilliant was not necessarily easy to find, and it cost you more to distribute it to the right people.

The value that’s yours for the taking:

• You have visibility and access to prospects, customers, talent, strategic partners and competitors. You can learn more in 10 minutes than you could in 6 months 10 years ago.
• You can present yourself, your employees and your company as professionally and creatively as you can imagine or you can remain vanilla and uninspired. You decide.
• You can work in new geographic markets and new sectors.
• You can learn what your customers value by what they are talking about online.
• You can laser focus your search and find more customers, employees and other stakeholders that add value to you and your business.
• You can jump into meaningful and relevant conversations and add your insight.
• You can continue in-person meetings online in a professional environment.
• You can take what you know and write about it and become known for your expertise in a new way.
• You can decide what you want to use LinkedIn for and do specific actions to achieve those results.
• As a basic LinkedIn member, you can build out your personal brand and showcase your expertise. You can gather a professional, diverse network to help you further your business goals and career and create a presence that enables you to stay top of mind and be relevant.

LinkedIn’s creates a series of “first value” that once you get past their user experience enables you to showcase your most important asset; you.

All you need to do is show up like you’re interested. You are interested, right?

If you need help getting past LinkedIn’s wonkiness, let us know. We can fill in the gap and help you turn LinkedIn into a key business asset.