Where should you focus your energies? You need a presence on both LinkedIn and Facebook if you want to be credible online.
If you’re a job seeker or just thinking about a career move, you should start with LinkedIn. Crafting your LinkedIn profile and tag line will help you to crystallize your professional qualifications.
Why LinkedIn?
- Focus is professional
- Navigation is easy
- Privacy controls are easy to set
- Added applications are all professional, no sheep launchers or Farmville animals to be found. No annoyance factor like on Facebook.
- Company and people research very easy
- Question & Answer section is a good place to learn something or to showcase your own knowledge
- Groups feature gives you chances to interact with others with similar interests
- Personal recommendations allow you to further showcase your abilities
- Ability to see how many people have viewed your profile.
LinkedIn Shortfalls
- Purely professional, you can’t really let your true personality shine through. You can list your outside interests on your profile, but that’s about it.
- Profile picture is only picture allowed.
Why Facebook?
In a word – reach!
According to Alexa.com , a site that ranks and provides analytics for websites:
| Alexa ranking | #2 | #32 |
| # of Members | 350 mill | 55 mill |
| Sites linking in | 668,000 | 117,000 |
| Time spent on site | 30 min. | 7 min. |
| Pageviews per user | 15 | 10 |
Facebook is the #2 ranked website in the world! It is second only to Google. Facebook has almost 7 times as many members as LinkedIn. People spend over 4 times as long on Facebook (30 minutes vs. 7 minutes for LinkedIn). People are more active on Facebook.
Anecdotal evidence for my blog, Facebook drives 10 times the traffic than does LinkedIn. And I have 4 times as many connections on LinkedIn. From the statistics above I can see why that is so.
So in summary, start with LinkedIn for your professional profile. Once your LinkedIn profile is more or less complete, start building your Facebook one.
Nancy Loderick's Blog 
Mirek Połyniak
February 11, 2010
Nancy, I couldn’t agree more with your point! If you’re focused on professional aspects go for LinkedIn – no doubt at all! Personally I’m very fond of Q&A section as I treat it as “hive mind” and often pick up other ppl brains. I’ve been give lots of valuable answers.
And I like very much LI’s minimalistic & neat design. No “Mafia wars”, “Farmville” and loads of stupid apps is a great benefit to me, as well!
Facebook is cool if you want to socialise more – no doubt you may find valuable biz contacts, too. But it’s not the prime focus…
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Nancy Loderick
February 11, 2010
@Mirek – thanks for your thoughts on LinkedIn. I am so with you on not liking the games and apps on Facebook. To me, they are a waste of time. I spend enough time online without needing more stuff!
Great point about the LinkedIn Q & A; there is a font of knowledge there.
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Erin Fogel
February 12, 2010
Great post. I’d be interested to know if you, or any of your readers, have experience or opinions on Facebook Causes versus Linkedin for Good. I know fb causes has been hugely successful, but seldom hear success stories about the latter.
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Nancy Loderick
February 12, 2010
@erin – thanks for your comment. I personally don’t have any experience with either Facebook Causes or LinkedIn for Good. It’s very telling that I’m familiar with Facebook Causes, but have never heard of LinkedIn for Good. And, I’m a very heavy LinkedIn user.
I did a quick Google search on both of these and the top results all came back for Facebook Causes. It sounds as though Facebook Causes is more well-known.
It might also be good to pose your question on LinkedIn Q&A and also on Facebook to see what folks say.
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M. Maki
February 17, 2010
Hey man I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to write something worth reading . I am all over the net and I see so much useless junk that is just written for the sake of putting something fresh on their site . It takes passion to make good stuff, thanks for caring.
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Nancy Loderick
February 18, 2010
@ m. maki – thanks for your comments! I’m glad you thought this was worth reading. I love writing about technology. My goal is to both educate and entertain.
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Jeffrey Neubauer
February 19, 2010
Best post yet Nancy! Excellent information and very relevant to many people in business!
Enjoy the weekend and your journey!
ChiTown Jeff
♥Service-Peace-Love-Accountability-Laughter-Equality-Compassion-Hope♥
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Nancy Loderick
February 19, 2010
Hey Jeff – thanks so much for the compliment! Your feedback on my prior posts has been helpful and I’ve tried to integrate into my posts. Have a great weekend!
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Paul Geffen
February 21, 2010
Great advice, Nancy, but why stop there? For a professional in the job market, there are many sites that will host profiles. I’ve created profiles and contributed content to dozens of sites. As a result the top fifty Google results for my name point to a wide variety of sites, and all of these pages were written by me.
LinkedIn is essential and central to any solo professional’s brand and marketing effort. After that is nailed down, start to explore the rest of the social networking world!
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Nancy Loderick
February 21, 2010
@Paul – You are absolutely correct that professionals should have profiles on as many sites as they can. Thanks for that tip. I find people are very confused as to where to start since there are so many options. I recommend people start with one profile and build from there. You also bring up an excellent point about Googling oneself. Everyone should be doing that frequently.
I think it’s also important to put some thought into one’s online profile, since good content on a few sites is more important than not so good content on many sites. And, it’s also good to keep updating the content. Either with new blog posts, new projects etc.
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