Linkedin vs Facebook for Professional Connections
I’ve been an avid LinkedIn user for the past five years, since my first year in business school. I think they’ve done an amazing job in three main areas.
1.) Users Became Mass Marketers - I proudly imported all my contacts to show I had the largest network and then sent them all messages asking for endorsements. I must have directly signed up over 100 users.
2.) They Built Critical Mass - regardless of why you signed up for LI, you go back because the professionals you need to find are there, and more of them are there than anywhere else.
3.) Their UI Worked
Clearly though, Facebook’s success has had an influence on LI. They’ve adopted some of their design elements, and their recently highly tauted valuation was no doubt helped by FB’s recent investment by Microsoft.
I’m one of those geeky power Linkedin Users that made sure his profile was “100% complete”, answers others questions, posts jobs on LI, loves the “grab contact” feature in the Outlook Toolbar plugin, and pays the maximum monthly fee to be able to directly contact users.
But, I have to admit in many cases I find myself using Facebook to originate and maintain professional connections. Here’s why:
1.) I can add friends and send messages to users without them being in my network or having their email addresses
2.) Chat helps me instantly and easily reach out to new professional connections and start to build relationships online
3.) Going against the grain can help catch someones attention. I get dozens of LI requests a week for folks that want to join my network. Every week or so I usually just accept all. But when a new FB users asks to friend me and leaves a business related message, it seems to draw more of my attention because I wasn’t expecting it and get less of them.
LI is the real deal and provides a distinct value that is different and better for professionals than FB. But I think LI should take heed of the little things that make me (and other users) gravitate to FB for professional usage (sometimes without even knowing why).
