First, a little recap about what I do for a living. I work for Page One Power who is a link building exclusive company. I work full time for them as a writer and a link builder, which means I’m working “on the floor” and usually have no connection to our clients, and they have no connection with me. However, because of my social media profiles and the fact that I’m writing under my own name for Page One Power, I’ve had avenues of contact with dozens of webmasters and editors, but my most eye-opening moments have been when clients or potential clients have contacted me directly through my social profiles.
Now, aside from Facebook where I have all of my college, high school, and family “friends,” my social profiles aren’t anything spectacular. After joining Page One Power about a year ago, I started a Twitter account and have amassed a whopping 32 followers and mainly use it to stay up to date on breaking news in my industry. I know it’s a powerful platform but I’m ignorant towards it and honestly haven’t put much time into it.
My biggest “professional” platform has been Google+ which I consider to be a very powerful digital marketing tool, and a great resource to boot. I have about 120 people circling me, the vast majority of which I do not know personally. I consider this a success since I’m relatively new to Google Plus, and it’s been very helpful to me as far as learning and implementing Authorship. However, LinkedIn has been one of the biggest helpers not only to me – but to Page One Power as well.
I started my LinkedIn profile after I graduated to potentially help me find a job. I’ve worked on it and kept it up to date since then, but I really didn’t appreciate it or put a lot of time into it until this last week after I got a request to join a network from someone I didn’t know with a brief message:
I was hesitant at first, thinking that this guy was just yanking my chain or trying to just get a lot of connections in a similar field – but knowing that I could just remove the connection later, I clicked the yellow button.
Within an hour I had a private message asking if I’d like to work on a link building project. I’m currently under contract with P1P so I cannot accept any outside link building work, which I told him, and forwarded Page One Power’s website on to him. He responded with his contact information, asking if someone could contact him; so I passed his information on to our sales department who will be contacting him shortly.
To my knowledge, this is the first account of one of us on the floor getting contacted directly and generating a potential lead. The contact said he found my profile through a search on LinkedIn for “link building” and my profile came up due to some of his 2nd degree connections. This got me to thinking, if all of the employees here were active on networking sites like Google+ and LinkedIn where they can be found for industry search terms, how beneficial might that be for the company in the long run?
This potential sales lead may not work out, but it’s still a lead that we didn’t have to generate. Me, an employee working on the production floor, was found independent of the company and was able to open up communication. Even if it doesn’t work out between the company and my connection, we’re still chatting and have found mutual interests and may even talk face to face over Google Talk (if I can figure it out). This has re-opened my eyes to how powerful networking sites can be, and how important it is to make and build personal connections on the internet rather than just building links.
