I was browsing through the LinkedIn Questions and there was a question about a woman looking for a woman CPA in San Diego. Well I promptly answered that I had the perfect person for her. My CPA is awesome and I thought she would be a perfect fit for what they were looking for. So when it came time for me to tell them how to get in touch with her, I was going to place a link to her LinkedIn profile. Unfortunately, my CPA didn’t have one – which is a major mistake.
LinkedIn is to Professionals what Google is to Search. Yes there are other social networking sites and other search engines. However LinkedIn and Google are the de facto standard in those two areas. If you are not in LinkedIn is akin to having Google not listing you. And not having Google list you at all is not a good thing if you intend to have people who don’t know you , find you.
So even though I provided a my CPA’s website, I know that the person asking the question was going to be looking for a LinkedIn profile. That’s what people in LinkedIn do – most of the 20 million of them anyway. And not having a presence in LinkedIn is going to hurt my CPA’s chances of getting hired. Which is a shame because she would have been such a perfect fit.
So if one of your goals is to have more people referring you, make it easy for the people in your network to do so. Get your profile listed on LinkedIn ASAP.
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Ah, I know that I must strengthen my presence throughout the web. My linkedin profile has my long term professional contacts who are in a different category than my more social contacts at other networking venues.
Thanks again for bringing this to the forefront.