Are You Investing Your Time On LinkedIn? Or Spending It?
I was reading an article on marketing a couple weeks ago, and one of their questions was, “How much will you spend on your marketing?” Which annoyed me immensely. I much prefer using the word “invest” as it specifically implies I expect a future return of that money spent.
Of course on LinkedIn – unless we are putting the money into LinkedIn ads – what we have up for grabs is our time. And in talking to a lot of people, I see a lot more spending going on than investing. Let me outline a few examples, and you can see if you are perhaps occasionally guilty of spending instead of investing.
Feed Floating (aka Death By Scrolling)
This is where you get sucked into the feed. You read random content that comes along, maybe seeing the odd thing that is interesting. But you keep scrolling, looking for more. That innocent looking “Page down” button could cost you the next thirty minutes of your day.
The problem with the feed is that while you can give LinkedIn some clues and guidance as to what you would like to read and what topics are important to you, LinkedIn’s algorithms ultimately decide what goes in the feed – and more and more often that includes sponsored posts and advertising.
My suggestion would be to make a list of the people or companies whose content you want to see and either subscribe to their content or “hard follow” them where you indicate you want to see all their content. Then, consume that content and only that content on LinkedIn, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.
Company Page Cruising
Company page cruisers start with good intentions: “I have these three prospect companies that I need to check out.” That gets done in fifteen minutes. But then, after completing this completely worthwhile and targeted task, they fall into the “hmm, I wonder who else is in their industry?” and an hour later, they find they have now taken an hour and fifteen minutes to complete their task.
Profile Browsing
This can be a particularly brutal add-on to company page cruising. You have researched the key people you found in those three companies you started with. Now you go to review their profiles. And on the right hand column, LinkedIn offers you “similar” profiles to the specific people you went looking for.
LinkedIn even labels this feature “More profiles to browse.” Let me ask you this question: When was the last time you said to yourself, “that was a really productive browsing session.”
Group Gallivanting
If you have ever gone to a LinkedIn Group you belong to “just to see what’s going on” you’re in trouble. Set up notifications if you need to, but hoping you will find something interesting this time is not a great idea.
“Flaner”, is a French word (pronounced “flah-nay” or by us Canadians, “flahn-eh?”) and it means to stroll or wander around with no particular destination in mind. To flaner is great if you are wandering around on vacation enjoying the architecture or neighborhoods in a place like Paris. Where flaner is not productive is on LinkedIn.
I have been guilty of all of these time sinks at one time or another. The key is I realized that “putting time in” on LinkedIn and “putting productive time in” on LinkedIn were not the same thing. I got more ruthless…and more productive.
Are you investing, or just spending your time on LinkedIn?
