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I’m doing a training session on Linkedin next week at a small industry conference and I’ve spent the morning preparing some of the content.  I’ve been reflecting on the increasingly important role that LinkedIn is playing in my professional life. Interestingly, it’s value to me is partly because I treated it as the poor cousin to Facebook for so long. 

What I’m finding is that I made lots of mistakes on Facebook as I learned ‘to do’ social media.  I mixed my business, personal and family life all together on Facebook.  In many ways, Facebook it useless to me for its intended purpose of hanging out with friends.  I say this because I’ve got “friends” I hardly know, business contacts who I need to impress, family members all over the world and a small core group of friends that I actually want to share my social life with.  At the end of the day, it’s simply too hard to deal with the mental effort to categorise and sort through who should see what.  Google+’s circles would really help me with this problem, but I don’t really feel like investing a weekend updating everything–the social aspect of social media is becoming rather 2010 for me. 

LinkedIn is a different story.  Up until recently, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the site and only entered clients who I didn’t know very well.  This has given me a network that is purely professional, which I’ve grown in the past 6 months to form a really valuable real estate network.  I don’t have to worry about what or who I should be, I can simply be my professional self online.  This makes my time on the site much more productive and I’m finding it to be my first point of call whenever I’m heading out to visit a client.  Understanding who you are on each social media site turns out to be the key to success.