Is Your Social Profile Sinking Your Business Development Efforts?

Steve Faber

Is Your Social Profile Hurting Your Business Development?

Social profiles are a critical part of any marketing and business development activity

Have you authored your profile in such a way as to accentuate the benefits of working with you, just like you would in the “about us” portion of your web-site.

The WELD2 team has a genuinely free offer at the end of this piece to assist you.

In other words, is your profile about the reader, your potential client, not (again NOT) about you? To be clear, yes, it’s about you, but it’s not FOR you. It’s for your target audience.

Ever check LinkedIn profiles? What does yours say about you?

Many check to see what a colleague is up to, or to see if one really is in the industry, possibly to explore a current position of a distant contact, and maybe touch base.

When crafting profiles we feel pressure to engineer words in such a way as to make ourselves into some weird & wild industry “Superhero”.

Many use the 3rd party approach, saying something like:

“Frank White, a “C” level executive, invented pencils, internal combustion, and Labra-doodles, and did this while saving starving one-legged children in Isis refugee camps and performing volunteer eye surgery on guide dogs.”

“He then went on to invent cherry flavor, and set the world’s land speed record.”

We know that these are actually written by the cat we’re checking out, it all seems a bit trite to us – does yours border on the offensive or egotistical?

Also – who falls for that narcissistic crap?

When reading a “3rd person profile, does the author think that the reader actually thought that Wolf Blitzer or Bob Costas wrote it? Like it is some kind of breaking news?

Come on…

For those that have written these types of profiles – our questions to you would be:

– How’s it worked out for you?
– Is your phone ringing out of battery power (as a result)?
– Have 6 guys called you today to assist them in the solving the cold-fusion process?

We suggest you invest a few in an in-depth audit on how your target audience reads your website and social profiles.

A healthy profile should gently inform the reader of his or her benefits by engaging with you and then a modest amount of industry credentials…not state all the authority, vision and accolades you have ever received since the 2nd grade…we’re not saying don’t include customer recommendations, but there is a fine line between too much and your professional “street cred”. You were the drive through window supervisor freshman year? Probably not important for your profile.

To discuss creating a truly effective social profile or anything else about your business, drop us a line.

Check back often. Seriously; we’ll have some great stuff from the WELD2 team and other insight from some of custom AV’s best.

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