FreelanceM.ag

Would you pass on the opportunity to attract the attention of hundreds of key prospects from all over the world for your freelancing business?

Without asking you specifically, I’m betting your answer is “no.” Yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing if you ignore LinkedIn. If you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re passing up an important opportunity to connect with prospects.

Most medium to larger companies maintain some sort of presence on LinkedIn. A recent Forrester study indicates that the vast majority of business decision-makers surveyed (81%) are on LinkedIn for business or personal reasons, even if they’re only watching what happens there. (See the article In Business, Everybody Uses Social Media For Work; The Question Is How from Zachary Reiss-Davis on Forrester for more details.)

Why would you pass up the opportunity to reach all of those decision-makers? Yet many freelancers still avoid LinkedIn involvement. One of the most common excuses I hear is that “LinkedIn is not designed for freelancers.”

To that objection I would say, “have you looked at LinkedIn recently?” Recent updates to the LinkedIn platform make LinkedIn an even better marketing tool for freelancers.

In this post, I’ll list six ways you can capture the attention of key freelancing prospects through LinkedIn.

If you liked this post, you may also like How to Go Deeper with Social Media and Get Better Results.

What do prospective clients do first when they are considering you for a freelancing gig?

One of the first things a prospective client will do is review your social media accounts. They want to know whether you’re reliable and trustworthy before they take a chance on using you for their freelancing project.

For freelancers whose social media accounts were set up before their professional career, this kind of scrutiny can be a problem. Imagine your prospective client finding an old photo of you drunk with your college buddies. Or perhaps they happen across the angry rant you posted years ago when you broke up with your high school sweetheart.

How embarrassing!

Teens and young adults often don’t think about the future consequences of what they share on social media. And sometimes those social shares come back to haunt them even after they’ve matured and grown into a responsible adult.

You can’t guarantee that what you once posted online will be gone forever. After all, there are Internet archives and someone could have saved an image or share on their computer. Also, the social media site may keep its own archive. However, you can take steps to make sure that what others see on your social media accounts today represents who you are now and not who you were as an immature teenager.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can clean up some common social media accounts. If you liked this post, you may also like 10 Reasons Why Clients Don’t Want to Hire You.

Note: Social media platforms change all the time. These tips worked when I wrote this post, but they may work differently in the future.

Is your social media strategy up to date? Be honest, now.

If you answered “no,” you’re probably not the only freelancer who did so. However, social media is an important marketing strategy for freelancers.

As I’ve mentioned before on FreelanceM.ag, social media is not a waste of time for freelancers if it’s done right.

Now of course you shouldn’t be spending all of your time on social media, but most freelancers will benefit by having an active online social media presence. Google+ should be a part of your strategy for building that online freelancing presence.

In case you don’t know, Google+ is still a fairly new social media platform. It started in summer of 2011, just over two years ago. That makes it quite a bit younger than Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Maybe that’s why some freelancers aren’t on board at Google+ yet.

Are you still unsure about Google+ In this post I share five very important reasons why freelancers need Google+ as part of their social media strategy.

If you’ve been freelancing for a while or if you’re a regular reader of FreelanceM.ag, you already understand the importance of social media participation.

You probably already have a social media profile set up on several networks. (If you don’t, or if you think social media is a complete waste of time, stop what you are doing and read this post right now: Should Freelancers “Waste” Time on Social Media?)

Despite having a social media presence, many freelancers report that they aren’t getting the results from social media that they had hoped for. There’s a reason for that. The reason is that most people fail to build relationships in social media–they simply don’t participate in a way that fosters relationship-building.

In this post I’ll explain how you can really build relationships using social media.

Is Twitter a waste of time for freelancers, or a valuable marketing tool?

At first glance, Twitter may not seem impressive. It may seem like another chat room–although a giant one.

Plus, tweets are limited to 140 characters (although some tools allow you to expand your tweets). You may wonder what you can share in only 140 characters.

If you don’t already use Twitter, you may wonder if you should. In fact, you may wonder whether Twitter is just a waste of time or a valuable marketing tool.

How much difference will Twitter participation make in your freelancing business?

I believe that the answer to that question is still “a lot of difference” and I’ll explain why in this post.