5 Ways Profile Pages Can Help Your Business

You’ve seen it before, when signing up at LinkedIn or other social networking sites, they want you to complete your profile (photo, work history, etc.), and in an effort to motivate you further, some even measure its completeness as you go.  In this post we’ll discuss why public profiles are important as a social marketing strategy as well as a search engine marketing strategy.  and how it allows business owners and career professionals to rank higher in the search engines and bring in more leads.

5 Ways Profile Pages Can Help Your Business

LinkedIn user profile pages are visible to other LinkedIn users, but also makes a version available to Google and other search engines.  These public pages are a nice exposure opportunity, and should be considered in every social marketing strategy.  Whether it’s Google, LinkedIn,
Facebook Fan Pages, or other public pages, together they add up significantly.

Public Profiles as a Search Engine Marketing Strategy

Search: (1) Everyone searches online, including our prospects and customers, having public pages helps them to find you.  Every time you put up a public page, or update an existing one, it calls the search engines and let’s them know to come and see the new content.  And every time there is a new instance of your information on a different page of a different site (another social network) the search engines weigh that more favorably.  (2) As you build out your profiles you are actually building out your brand, and making it easier for searchers to find you, and you want to be found, don’t you?

Using Social Networking Public Profiles as a Social Marketing Strategy

The age of personal marketing is here. Technology makes this possible.  If you have a social profile on any of the social networking sites, congratulations, you are a participant in personal marketing.

In having multiple social networking profiles as a part of your social marketing strategy, you are (3) meeting the market on their terms (not everyone uses LinkedIn, or Facebook), where they hang out to connect with people.  Have a look at this list of top social networking sites for more ideas.

Of course the social sites let you connect on a much more human level than the search engines can provide.  This (4) allows your search engine marketing strategy to leverage public profiles to introduce your market to your human/social side (part of a social marketing strategy).

Social Marketing Strategy, a Controversy

If you have a public profile on 5 social networks, that is great.  Perhaps 4 more than your competition.  However, if you have 10 employees, and THEY have your business web address listed as their place of employment on their public profile pages, you just added 50 more opportunities for the search engines and social networks to learn about your business.

These benefits of profile pages are obvious to users of those social networking sites, however in the midst of using them in a social marketing strategy, equally important is their role as a search engine marketing strategy.  Taking it up a few notches, getting the entire company on board with social networking sites can reap dividends in both traffic to your website, and sales.

Chime in! How do you see social networking profiles benefiting your business? Leave your comments in the boxes below.

*Image credits to M. Keefe