Time For A Refresher: 20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT Be On LinkedIn

March 20, 2013 / in LinkedIn / by Mic Johnson

A couple of years ago I wrote an an article called “10 Reasons Why Your Business Should Not Be On LinkedIn“. The inspiration for that article came from the fact that I was amazed that part of my day-to-day job involved convincing business owners, especially those in the B2B space, that LinkedIn was a viable tool to help them grow their business and facilitate culture change.

Then, a year ago, I wrote 20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT Be On LinkedIn. Maybe you read it then, maybe you never read it, or maybe you meant to read it but got busy doing something else. 

All I know is that we’re still having the same conversations with business owners and decisions makers today. The education process continues. 

So I thought it was time to dust off this blog from last year. I hope it gives you some things to think about and challenges your opinions of what LinkedIn is and why it matters. 

Enjoy the honesty, wit, humor, and yes, sarcasm, with which I wrote this article originally. And if you know any B2B folks that still think LinkedIn is “only for people looking for jobs”, please pass this post along! 

20 Reasons Your Business Should NOT Be On LinkedIn

1. You will take a cold call over a warm, or even hot, call every day of the week. 

2. You think business can only be done face-to-face even though relationship building (isn’t that what business is all about?) happens every single day online. 

3. You believe that you (and your employees) 30% complete profile with no summary, no picture and zero recommendations doesn’t reflect poorly on you or your business.

4. You don’t have time to spend a couple of hours on LinkedIn each week to research prospects because you are too busy doing the same sales techniques you’ve used your entire career. 

5. You don’t want to participate in forums that make you or your business look like subject matter experts in your industry.

6. You don’t want to read blog articles and stories from people in your professional network that may help you or your business.

7. You don’t want to take the time to give recommendations to people that you’ve worked with throughout your career that are awesome because there isn’t anything in it for you.

8. When customers or prospects search for you on LinkedIn, you want to make sure they can’t find you. And if they do, you want to make sure that your personal profile and company page don’t tell them anything of value. 

9. You know for a fact that none of the 150 million people on LinkedIn are your customers or prospects.

10. You know that LinkedIn is adding 2 people every second (up from 1 person a second a year ago) but those people probably won’t ever want to buy anything anyway. 

11. You don’t want to share your personal and professional brand with people because that would be bragging. Even though they want to know. Everyone knows that, in business, it’s always better to not give people what they want.

12. You don’t want to know more about people that you are doing business with or would like to do business with.

13. You believe, with all of your heart, that there is no value in keeping up with what is going on in your professional network (such as new business deals, new hires, new products and services, etc.).

14. You have all the business you will ever need and aren’t interested in generating more.

15. You prefer to limit your prospecting and sales activity to the two networking groups you belong to and the five coffees and lunches you try to set up each week.

16. You don’t see any value in updating your LinkedIn status regularly to tell your professional network about things that may help them. 

17. You think tools like LinkedIn aren’t fundamentally changing the way business is done.

18. You don’t want your employees spending time on a tool that can help enhance your brand, your reach, and open up the lines of communication. 

19. You don’t want to find talented people to work for you or get recommendations from people that they are connected to on LinkedIn. A two-page resume and a 1-hour interview give you all you need to make a $50,000 decision. 

20. You think you’ve done your job on LinkedIn by having an “ok” profile “just so you’re out there” and see nothing wrong with having a LinkedIn inbox full of invitations and messages you haven’t responded to. 

If you made it through the whole list, THANK YOU. What do you think?