Social networks, we know but when it comes to approaching a more professional notion, we must focus more on the one that will allow us to better achieve our goals 🚀. Today, on the menu, we tackle the professional social network. Before we praise the different networks we’re going to look at today, we’ll leave you with a little video on how to succeed on LinkedIn. This can only give you good keys to succeed on this platform.
Definition of social networks
To understand what a social network is, we will immediately define the term with you. A social network is basically a group of people who want to exchange around one or more themes. We can consider the forum as the ancestor 🧙♂️ of the social network. Of course, each social network has its own audience and its own way of working.
We can quickly go through the applications that dot our small (and bigger) screens:
- Instagram.
- Facebook.
- Pinterest.
- Snapchat.
- BeReal.
- Twitter.
- Tik Tok.
- 9gag.
- Discord.
- Reddit.
- YouTube.
- Telegram.
- WhatsApp.
- Twitch.
Of course, you are not on all these social media sites at the same time since there is a target 🎯 according to each platform. There are also other networks, more professional, on which we will focus. We will stop here for this article, but know that there are a multitude of others that are often unknown because they are used in other countries for example.
What is a professional social network?
Given the craze of social networks, it was also necessary to find its account at the professional level and this is what many have decided to do. In fact, you just have to look at the practices of the professional social network LinkedIn. Indeed, more and more recruiters are looking for their new talents on professional social networks. Therefore, we can say that a professional social network is for people who want to exchange around a topic but the professional 🌏 world. As for the social networks we are used to see, we will mention some of them:
- LinkedIn (the famous one).
- Viadeo.
- Workplace (By Facebook).
- Quora.
- Twitter (because yes it is also for professional purposes).
- FlickR.
We’re already pretty good with those. But we must also take into account that some of our social networks such as Instagram can also be used for professional purposes. We will talk about it in the rest of this article.
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What is the purpose of a professional network?
Of course, it is not used to tell your last vacation or show pictures of your cat 🐈⬛ in weird positions. A professional social network is for you to network. A professional network will serve you to:
- Meet professionals from the same sector (or not).
- Exchange on topics.
- Recruiting talent for your team.
- Manage your professional life (thanks to these, you will be able to find out about the different companies you would like to work in. If you have the information you want, you are more likely to know the environment and therefore to be taken at a future interview for example).
- Find a job.
- Increase your visibility 👀.
- Have one’s expertise in a field recognized.
One of the key points that we also forgot to mention is of course the fact that you can prospect with social networks. In addition to helping you find a company or recruit, you can also use social networks to sell a product or service.
Choose the right professional social network
| Social networks | ||||||||||||
| Goals | Quora | Workplace | YouTube | Snapchat | TikTok | BeReal | Viadeo | |||||
| Visibility | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ |
| Gaining subscribers | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ||
| Prospecting | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||||||||
| BtoB | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ||||||
| BtoC | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||
| Content sharing | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||||
| Recruit | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||||||||
| Apply | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ||||||||
| Sharing videos | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||
| Sharing photos | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||
| Conduct a competitive intelligence survey | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | |||||||
| Network | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ||||
| Selling a product or service | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐ | ||||||||
Our opinion may be biased, but the one that ticks all the boxes is LinkedIn. Are you a LinkedIn person too? Admit it to us 😏.
To choose the right network, you need to know the goals 🏅 you want to achieve. To help you in your search, we have gathered several professional social networks by giving you their advantages and disadvantages. Here, you have to understand that the goal you want to put forward will determine the platform you will use. Because yes, if you decide to sell a product to an older persona, there is little chance that this target is on Instagram for example. Let’s take a look at the different social media platforms we have at our disposal.
Certainly the most famous network, LinkedIn has millions of users worldwide. It’s a giant 🦣 and it packs a punch.
LinkedIn was created by Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue. Our two Americans, well surrounded, founded LinkedIn in December 2002 (but the network was born in 2003). The success is there, since already in 2006, we reach 8 million members on the platform. LinkedIn has managed to implement many features that allow users to find their happiness. At the beginning, this social media site, was made to connect with your colleagues and find a job.
But in the end, what are the advantages of being on LinkedIn?
- Create opportunities by sending invitations to professionals in your industry to expand your network.
- Use the LinkedIn database to prospect for new clients.
- Increase your visibility and awareness by creating publications to show your level of expertise.
- Increase your company’s visibility (by encouraging your employees to post on the network and by creating a company page).
- Know your competitive environment (monitor your competitors by checking what works best for them and what interests your target).
- Advertise to reach your targets.
Does this network have some flaws? Like all others, yes. However, it is up to you to judge whether or not they are prohibitive to achieving your goals.
- The platform is very B2B oriented. This seems normal since at the base, it is professionals who connect to it.
- Like all other networks, LinkedIn is a social network that requires you to spend time on it. It can be very time consuming if you want to publish regularly. Fortunately, Podawaa and Waalaxy exist to help you in your prospection.
- The cost of advertising on LinkedIn.
Bonus point: Waalaxy to stand out on LinkedIn
Obviously, if you want to break through on the LinkedIn social network, we weren’t going to pass up being able to give you little tips ✅ on how to use super awesome tools.
If you’re not familiar with Waalaxy, we’ll give you a quick introduction to it here. This tool is a small chrome extension that allows you to perform several prospecting actions on LinkedIn. It is really a perfect tool to prospect on LinkedIn since it will allow you to :
- Receiving responses.
- Get 700 leads a week in just 10 min a day 😱.
- Automate your actions.
- Find the professional emails 📩 of your prospects.
- Be able to synchronize your CRMs with Waalaxy.
- Import and export your leads.
- Create message templates.
- Send mass messages to your customers or prospects.
- Benefit from a complete dashboard to track the progress of your actions.
- Launch campaigns.
The tool is very complete and you can discover all its features for free during 7 days. After this period, you will be able to benefit from the free subscription allowing you to start prospecting. But there are other subscription plans that will certainly be useful to you. Feel free to check them out right here.
Viadeo
Founded by Thierry Lunati and Dan Serfaty, this French media is also, like LinkedIn, professional oriented. Indeed, you will be able to exchange 👄 and meet professionals of your sector.
Let’s take a look at the advantages of using this social media right away.
- Find new prospects.
- Benefit from the network of your contacts.
- Know your competitive environment.
- Have a small business audience.
- Create your network.
- Create discussion groups.
- Possibility to recruit via this network.
Like other networks, it also has some flaws.
- Limited site in free version.
- Time consuming.
- Less users than its competitor LinkedIn.
Workplace
If you know a little bit about the social media platform Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg, you won’t feel out of place with Workplace. Indeed, Meta has decided to open up to the world of work by creating Workplace by Facebook. It is available in a number of languages and has 20 million monthly active users.
Let’s take a closer look at what this platform has to offer.
- Interface substantially like Facebook (for those who are used to it, it’s pretty cool).
- Automatic translation.
- Community approach.
- Very easy to use live photo and video features.
- Similar to Facebook (some users are reluctant to engage professionally on a platform like this).
- A little too social.
It looks a lot like Slack and allows you to centralize information.
Using Twitter can be excellent professionally for your communication strategy. This platform is different from what we have seen before.
Indeed, Twitter favors immediacy and pushes users to create powerful posts. Let’s see what this social media has in store for us.
- Increase your visibility.
- Increase your influence.
- Communicate in real time with your users or customers.
- Very accessible and fast.
- Notion of virality.
- Easy to track data (through one or more hashtags).
On the downside, we will find :
Quora
It is the network par excellence of questions and answers. We can say that it is a rather well thought forum 🧠. 
For your professional networking, let’s see what it can do for you.
- Exchanges starting from a question (it shows the engagement of your subscribers).
- Simple and free sign up.
- Generate marketing levers.
- Make your prospects and target discover your service.
- You can also ask questions to know what improvements to make to a product or service.
- Show your expertise.
- Increase your visibility.
- Promote your website.
- You can quickly change your language.
As for what you may not want in your web marketing strategy, here’s what it is.
- The veracity of the information that can be found there.
- Extremely time consuming (you go from one question to another without seeing the time spent).
- Potential trolls that can spoil your publications (but it’s like on any social network).
Professional social network: Medium
This little platform was created by the founders of Twitter. It will allow you to share content, photos or even videos 📹.
It basically takes the components of other networks that we already know such as Tumblr, Pinterest or Reddit. But what are the nuggets that this network can bring us?
- Increase your visibility.
- Organize your topics into collections (like Pinterest boards).
- Members can also provide clarification on content.
- Uncluttered aesthetics.
- Easy to search based on keywords.
- 650,000 users.
- Unlimited access for $1 per week (for premium content).
- No ability to make a call to action.
- Very American identity (companies may not recognize themselves on this medium).
- English content is the best (no chance if you speak another language or if your target is not English speaking).
What do you mean by that? Instagram? A professional social network? You’re probably wondering and we’re going to tell you that yes, Instagram can be used for professional purposes.
Launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Michel Mike Krieger, Instagram is one of the must-have social network. This little app allows you to do photo-sharing 🥠 and video-sharing. But is it a good thing to use this platform littered with influencers? Let’s find out.
- Increase your visibility.
- 25 million monthly visits.
- Build customer loyalty by keeping the relationship with them.
- Community aspect.
- Young audience (16-24 years old).
- Showcase for products.
It’s not necessarily all rosy, so let’s also check out what’s going on on the downside.
- If you don’t post regularly, your audience may feel abandoned.
- You have to be extremely careful when talking about a hot topic.
- Young audience (yes, it’s purposely placed here too since this may not be what you’re looking for).
- Not suitable for writing long posts (you can, but that’s not what you’re looking for on Instagram).
- Extremely time consuming (you have to think about future posts, promotions, advertising…).
- Not very relevant if you are selling a service.
TikTok
And yes, we’re also going to talk about this social network that is very much oriented for an audience that is on their smartphone. TikTok was launched in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance. It specializes in video sharing and social networking.
Many people wonder what the point of TikTok is for a business. If we were to answer this question without thinking much about it, the first thing that comes to mind is the sharing of daily life. Let’s go and see the other beneficial points that can interest us.
- Increased visibility.
- Engagement of the audience.
- Identification of your targets with your brand.
- Showing and sharing your values.
- Close relationship with your customers.
- Ideal for content marketing.
- Little investment in the platform.
- No advertising account, you have to contact the company directly.
- The price to advertise is very high.
- One and only format: video.
- The video must be short.
- Bad reputation of the platform seen by the companies.
A bit like its competitor Instagram, Pinterest is also a social network for sharing photographs. It was launched in 2010 by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp and Ben Sibermann. On this platform, you have the opportunity to share your interests, passions, hobbies through different categories of photos and then redirect them to your landing page.
Let’s take a closer look at what Pinterest has to offer.
- You will be able to improve your SEO (or natural referencing).
- Gain visibility.
- Succeed in generating sales.
- Develop your brand image.
There are of course a few details that we can note if we want to use this social network in our strategy.
- The audience is mostly female – 85% (not the ideal platform if you’re only targeting men).
- A bit time consuming if you have to apply yourself to make beautiful visuals.
- Make very attractive visuals (the better your image, the more likely it is to be clicked on).
- Be regular.
Snapchat
We are going to introduce you to the latest (but know that there are still many other social networks), Snapchat. This mobile application was created with the purpose of sharing videos as well as photos and text. It is students 🧑🎓 who are behind this application, namely Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown.
It is one of the most popular social networks among teens but it differs in its ephemeral aspect. We take stock of the different advantages to use it for your business. Of course, you will have to create a Snapchat Business account.
- Develop a modern brand image.
- Direct contact with your target.
- You can quickly capture your target’s attention and put calls to action (CTA).
- You can activate the position (useful to show where you are and therefore push targets to come to an event).
You know the drill 🎶, let’s go over what we could potentially dislike about using Snapchat for business.
- If the videos are too long, you might not watch everything.
- No possibility to write a post like on LinkedIn or Workplace.
- Obligation to look at the statistics under 24 hours (the time that a story lasts).
- Time consuming.
- Ephemeral nature of videos.
- Less interaction than on other platforms (no like, no comment).
- Paid functionality a bit expensive.
- No possibility to share your content.
You think we were going to leave you there, right after this great enumeration? Not at all, we decided to put everything in a table, along with other social networks so you can compare and choose what seems right for your strategy.
The importance of making a profile on a social network
If there’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet but is important 💗 on absolutely every social network, it’s completing and maintaining your profile. On every social network, your profile acts as a showcase of yourself on the one hand but also of your business. Therefore, having a good profile is a must. When you use your social networks in a personal way, you pay attention to the image you send back, right? Well, this is even more true when it comes to a professional profile. You need to have a complete ✅ and optimized profile. And how is that done? We’ll walk you through the steps:
- Put a professional profile picture (if you’re going on a network where it’s the company that is highlighted, put a picture of your logo or your team if you want to show the human side).
- Fill in as much information as possible.
- Give as much information as possible about yourself or your entity.
- Create content and don’t forget to be present on these networks.
What we want to tell you in completing your profile is that you will tend to be trusted if all the fields are filled in. Imagine you are a customer and you want to buy 💰 from a company or person and you see little or no record of the company’s existence. It’s obvious that you’ll never want to spend with them.
What are the elements of a good professional network?
For us there are several things that need to be taken into consideration. The very first thing to consider is what you are going to sell and how you are going to do it. Then you need to look at your audience and therefore target the people who are likely to buy from you. From there, depending on their habits and preferences, you will be able to decide on the platform to use. For us, the essential features of a professional network (no matter who your targets are) are :
- The ability to prospect on a network (whether it is to conquer customers or talents or companies).
- The ergonomics.
- The fact of being able to exchange with your users.
- To gain visibility.
For us, these are the four must-haves ⭐ for a professional network to be good. Of course, all other cool features are welcome but we focus on these in particular.
Conclusion of the article Professional Social Network
Through this article, we have seen what a social network is, what it is used for and why it should be integrated into our digital strategy. The use of social networking sites has become very widespread in recent years, so it is normal to see some networks turn exclusively to a professional target. We could see several social networks such as :
- Instagram.
- Snapchat.
- Pinterest.
- TikTok.
- Twitter.
But we could also see those dedicated to the professional world (forjob search, to develop its branding…) as :
- LinkedIn.
- Viadeo.
- Workplace.
- Quora.
- Medium.
For us, the one that will remain the best social network in our eyes will remain LinkedIn. It is the most complete, the one that allows you to share posts 🖊️, articles, photos and videos. There are real prospecting opportunities on this incredible platform. Of course, you’re not being asked to pick one particular social network and skip the other social networks. The goal is for you to be visible, if you decide to associate two, three or four social networks to your marketing strategy, it is quite possible as long as these networks remain relevant and in line with your objectives. That’s what multi-channel is all about.
FAQ of the article Professional Social Network
For any further questions, it’s right here 👇 that it happens.
Which GAFAMs do these networks belong to?
Before knowing who belongs to what, it is interesting to look at GAFAMs. First of all what is it? Well, it’s an acronym for the five companies in the technology sector. They are the most popular and most publicly traded companies (for the record, the five of them reach a capitalization of $4.5 trillion. That’s huge.
We will therefore name :
- Google.
- Apple.
- Facebook.
- Amazon.
- Microsoft.
To find out which GAFAMs these networks belong to, we’ll make a list for you 📄. In Google, we can find:
- Google+ or Google Currents (we didn’t talk about it in this article but it’s a social network).
If we head to Apple 🍎 :
- Ping (unfortunately it does not exist anymore).
When it comes to Facebook (which we can also call Meta), we’re going to get:
- Facebook (thanks Sherlock).
- Workplace.
- WhatsApp.
- Messenger.
- Instagram.
When we go to Amazon:
- Kindle 📖(it’s a social network for Kindle users and we didn’t mention it during this article).
At Microsoft, we will find:
- LinkedIn (the famous, the most beautiful ❤️).
Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Viadeo, Quora and Snapchat is not owned by any GAFAM
Create a professional social network or network
If you want to develop your network and learn how to network, it’s very easy to get started. Once you have defined your goals, you will have to find a target. Once this is done, you can get down to business. Indeed, you are only going to add the people who are part of your ideal customer picture to your network.
This is very important ⚡. You can also do this with professionals in your industry if you want to do a knowledge exchange for example. Once you had brought them into your network, you just have to show your different knowledge and try to convince them that your product or service is the best. If you want to make publications, we advise you to be extremely careful with your copywriting.
Which social network is the most recognized?
The big winner is Facebook with 2.2 billion monthly active users worldwide. It is the most popular ⭐ currently. You can very well have a personal account or a page that shows your products if you are a business (there is also a marketplace dedicated to craftsmen).
The E-reputation
To define the E-reputation, it’s very simple. It is the reputation that a company, a freelancer, a brand has online. In fact, it’s the image that you will convey 🚗 on the web. This reputation can be good or bad (in the case of a bad buzz for example).
If you want an example of bad buzz, one example is Facebook with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
How to use social networks for business purposes?
You can very well use the networks that are used for entertainment for business purposes. That’s what we mean here. Let’s say you’re a florist, you can use Instagram as a showcase. And you can very well couple it with prospecting on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, the target is BtoB, but in some cases, your activity can be matched on two different networks, so why not 💰?
And it’s up to you to use the networks that fit your target, so you’ll be multichannel (you’ll potentially attract more people since you’ll be seen on several platforms) and achieve complementarity in your strategy.
That’s it, you’re ready to tackle your prospecting or job search head on and even recruit your future talent since you know all about what you need to know about a professional social network. Which one do you prefer 🥰?
