Your online profiles are costing you money.

Saying our FREE online profiles in all of the social venues is costing us money may be confusing. Let’s think about that statement. If you create a profile and forget about it for a long while, it becomes dated, perhaps even incorrect. Not just headshots and the company you work for, but your basic statement about yourself. When you created your profiles chances are you were just checking off a box to get marketing off your back.

• Facebook - check
• LinkedIn - check
• Twitter - check
• Google+ - check
• About.me - check

And what about all of the other profiles you forget about - such as trade organizations, professional and alumni associations, online directories. There’s a HUGE chance you have no clue how many profiles you’ve created. If you only think about the ones you remember, that gives you a place to start.

Starting with the more obvious: LinkedIn, Facebook - page AND profile, Twitter, About.me and Google+ the first thing you want to think about is WHOM you are trying to reach and what you want them to do. How do you want them to connect with you? What do you want them to THINK about you? It is not one profile fits all here. You have to tailor it. What I say on Facebook is not the same as LinkedIn. If you are in the camp that favors the, “It’s all me - I’m the same everywhere - they can accept me or not!” chances are you wish you earned more money, but that arrogance is getting in your way. Business is business, even if clients become friends or friends become clients, it’s a different hat. You are asking them to pay you for your knowledge and skills. Respect that and them. This segways into headshots. Keep it clean and professional on LinkedIn. Have more fun on Facebook, but it’s still a good idea to have an actual photo rather than cartoon, a picture of your dog - unless that’s your business,. You want anyone seeking you to know it is the RIGHT you. On all of social media, I’m grateful that the OTHER Susan Finch in New York is a blonde. It helps at first glance. Also, the fact I’m in Oregon and she’s in New York. We are both clear who we are in all venues.

Moving on to your links you can include.

Have you tested them lately? As a producer for several online radio shows, I run across guests all the time that haven’t updated their LinkedIn profiles for months or even YEARS. They link to old companies and broken pages. It makes me wonder if they realize that company doesn’t consider them an employee any more. This leads into work history and projects and the topic of lost revenue through social media.

When your profile is broken, outdated with only crickets chirping in your timeline, people will think you are not current. You’ve done nothing new, can’t be bothered keeping your details updated. How can they count on you to help them if they can’t take care of themselves?

Spend some time reading EACH social media profile.

• Would you hire you?
• If you were interested in becoming YOUR client, how would you connect?
• What is the next step?

An example of a pretty decent About.me profile is at susanfinch.me Short, with a clear call to action and OFFER in the same breath.

You will note that my social profiles are not as consistent as I’d like. Remember I mentioned that OTHER Susan Finch - vanity URLs are tough when your name isn’t super unusual.

And now we move on to the call to action in each profile.

Ask someone else to read your profiles through. Ask them if they understand what you do, your capabilities and what they need to do next in order to work with you. Ideally, the person helping you by reviewing it would understand your buyer personas pretty well to help you see any holes, potential confusion, or nannering on you are doing in your profiles. If they help you with this, at least send them a gift card or take them out for drinks to thank them. Return the favor for them, too.

At the end of your profiles, entice people to make an appointment, get to know your company better, invite you to speak - whatever the goal that makes you money, ASK FOR IT with an EASY link. It may be a different landing page for each venue. That’s a great way to track it if it’s working. Perhaps you simply link to your appointment scheduler page. The goal isn’t to close the deal, but to get them to call. Give them the time, don’t tell them how to make the watch.

With LinkedIn - this will be an entire episode on it’s own, realize you can add PROJECTS without changing jobs. Something like a case study where you can show off something with great results.

Facebook: Once you are done updating Facebook with a new image - it will notify all of your “friends” and followers. LinkedIn used to do this, but caught on that people played this in order to get to the top of the newsfeed with a visual update. Now you have to do something more than upload an image - change your position, add a company - when you do that, you will end up in notifications and news feeds on LinkedIn.  Before you do that, consider writing an ARTICLE to publish in your profile to make a bigger splash. If you don’t have much to say, with your newly updated profile, commit to a BARE MINIMUM of 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn for two weeks only sharing items from others, stories from the news, nothing self-serving. MENTION companies and PEOPLE.  Let people know you are still around and are now current and of value rather than just tooting your own horn.

Ready to clean up your profiles and stop losing money with them?

If you need help finding all the ones you’ve forgotten, check out: https://exitpowerstrategies.com/determining/ to figure out which scenario fits you so we can start collecting all of the forgotten profiles and clean them up!

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