search engine – Business in dialogue

Marketers are often reproached that they are not marketing themselves. Especially online, personal branding can be easy and effective but is often overlooked. When I asked a friend this morning why she didn’t had a profile picture on Facebook, she explained that she was looking for a job and realized that her crazy profile picture might work against her. And that’s true, it is very likely that possible employees will do a quick search on you on internet.

Where Facebook and other social media platforms can give employees a first impression, it is LinkedIn that is mostly used for professional purposes. It is the largest professional network on the net, with more than 90 million users in 200 countries who conducted nearly two billion people searches last year. It is easy to find people, but then again, in order to stand out you need to keep your resume up-to-date and differentiated from the others. If you are a job seeker or not, it starts by completing your LinkedIn profile. There is a tool that helps you do that and increasing your findability at the same time.

Now, LinkedIn continues to make adjustments and improvements and one new added section is “skills”. Sharlyn Lauby explains in her blog how you can optimize this new skill section in your LinkedIn profile. I will try to summarize the main points:

The new section helps you organize your skills and assets immediately after your education credentials. They will stand out more and show what a well-rounded job candidate you are. The new feature on LinkedIn allow you to use multiple keywords to describe your skills, making you more discoverable for a recruiter. He looks for specific set of skills, and when they match yours he will contact you. Therefore it important to list your true qualifications and skills and not list yourself as an expert in your field if you are not.

LinkedIn users, jobseekers and candidates are highly recommended to list their qualifications and skills in this section because this is where you can differentiate yourself from others. Even if you’re not looking for a job today, your LinkedIn profile serves as a professional introduction of your experience and expertise. LinkedIn profiles should be viewed as a personal marketing brochure to connect business professionals and create opportunities.

Apart from Skills, LinkedIn offers other sections as well. Take a look if they are relevant to you and your industry. Marketers, don’t forget about youself!

I shortly want to come back on the use of adwords, this time used for Google. Search engines are constantly trying to make your results more relevant to its user. At social marketing hub they explain ways how search engines make their results more personal and at wordstracker.com they talk about possible effects for you as an owner of a website. What I am wondering is how can I figure out what the organic search results of my potential customers are. We might not be in the same geographical place, they might even not be in the same geographical place, they probably have a different Query History too. So how do I know what comes up in their search results and on which place will I be? We can kind of influence what people see by using Adwords but why do you want to do that when you are in the top-3 of organic results. And are Googles advertisements also ordered by geographical relevance? That would help the the Adword campaign of local stores to be relevant to the people close around them but wouldn’t they miss out on a big piece of ‘potential customer’ pie just outside their radius? And what about online stores that now have to compete for advertising space with all the local brick&mortar companies in their category?

I think the personalization of search engines is a wonderful development for the user but raises questions for advertisers. Do you have the answer? Please respond below.