Experience sharing - linkedin as social media tool for private and professional utilisation

 Good morning all You highly welcome readers of my posts and followers of my blog from places almost on all continents of the globe. 

Today - answering a question, which I am quite often beeing asked - I would like to share my own private and professional experiences with the utilisation of linkedin as a social media tool. 

I have just found out in my profile, that I am a linkedin user ("member") since April 24, 2010, means since meanwhile 10 years. To be true - I had the feeling, that this was much longer already, but obviously it is not the case. One more hint, that we have to be very careful with "feelings" when it comes to facts and numbers.

Some people still believe, that linkedin users were primarily looking for new job opportunities. But I do not really believe in this. For sure almost all of us are permanently open for new improvement opportunities and lots of people seek openly or - as our company does as well - offer new jobs in linkedin.

But this was definitely not the reason for me, when I joined linkedin as a user 10 years ago. At that time, just half a year living in beautiful Recife in the northeast of Brazil, to where I had moved 5 months earlier together with my familly from Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, I was earning good money by doing interim management for German industrial companies in Brazil and in those days I thought, that I would continue forever working independently and as my own boss in this way. 

I think it was mainly for curiosity and because some friends recommended this to me, that I registered as linkedin user. And as far as I remember, I did not really use it very intensively. 

My real interest in using actively linkedin came several years later, when I was working as Managing Director at GEA do Brasil (Heat Exchanger division of the GEA Group, today Kelvion) in Franco da Rocha, Sao Paulo, from 2011 on.  

At that time I was developping several strategic projects together with my management team colleagues and I started to discover the opportunities for finding interesting information and contacts to customers, suppliers, service providers incl. consultants and other helpful people by using actively linkedin and other online information sources.

And this was also the time when I started to look up worldwide friends, colleagues and former colleagues and when the construction of my extensive global contact network began. But I doubt, that I had more than 1000 contacts until then. Today I have already more than 10.000. And - and this is extremely important for me to say - I am quite selective and criterious, when it comes to the acception of contact requests. 

I have always given very high importance to keep a certain quality level of my network and not to collect dubious people, which You can find easily everywhere and easily, as f.e. in linkedin and all the other social media. 

My really active utilisation and experience with linkedin started only from the end of 2014 on, when I had started in my todays function as President of Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) in Itatiba, Sao Paulo. 

The main reason was, that I found quite quickly out, that my management team colleague Elisangela Santos (elisangela.santos@vulkan.com; +55 11 99619 2808), Sales Director for our marine division Vulkan Couplings (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/couplings) in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Suriname and Guyana and also Marketing Director of our company, was already a very active and experienced linkedin user.

When we discovered, that we had very similiar interests and experiences in social media, marketing, new company and general cultural subjects and developments, we immediately started our until today very intensive colaboration and joint development of related projects for our company. 

Actually Elisangela had already several years ago opened one of the worldwide first linkedin groups for Vulkan. And our linkedin group Vulkan do Brasil has already attracted lots of followers, mainly in Brazil itself. 

Since then other very experienced, creative and highly active linkedin and social media in general users developped within our management team and more and more also in our whole company. And our Brazilian linkedin group never stopped to grow. 

Until today we have already attracted more than 10.000 followers - by far the most of them high professionals and decision makers at many places, companies, industries, institutions and associations etc. 

But we also have created sister groups in linkedin for our industrial sales division Vulkan Drive Tech Latam (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/drivetech) and for our 2 years ago created Vulkan Southern Hemisphere initiative, which comprises the Brazilian, Australian and South African companies of the Vulkan Group:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/vulkan-do-brasil/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/vulkandrivetechlatam/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/vulkan-southern-hemisphere/

All our linkedin groups have meanwhile become strong communication channels to our worldwide followers incl. to many of our Vulkan Group colleagues and also to many employees of our own company. We post quite frequently news about us, our company and our business and share this content with our followers and the public. 

This has created a very nice communication with our audience and we receive a lot of (almost always positive) feedback from lots of people from all over the world. And all our groups keep constantly growing. 

And for sure - coming back to the statement from the beginning - many candidates approach us in linkedin and apply for jobs with us and we also nowadays use linkedin very actively for direct and indirect candidate search, whenever we are hiring new employees for almost all levels of our organisation.

I hope that this has given You a rough idea, of how I personally and how we as Vulkan do Brasil use this tool and for which purposes. 

In future posts I will also give You some insights in how and when we have developped our social media strategy, with which other social media we have gained experience so far, what we understand as "social selling" and as "influencing". 

That`s all what I wanted to share with You for today. Have lots of fun and success and see You again here in my blog tomorrow.