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Adding professional skills on Facebook ala LinkedIn

September 8, 2013

FacebookThe Next Web’s Ken Yeung (@thekenyeung) reported over the weekend that Facebook is in the process of implementing a feature enabling users to add professional Skills, mirroring LinkedIn.

From a Facebook spokesperson:

We are currently testing a new option where you can add your professional skills to the work and education section of your timeline.

To add Professional Skills to your profile, go to your About section and you’ll see Professional Skills in the Work and Education area. Once you click on the Edit button for that area, you’ll be able to add skills. Skills are limited to those displayed as you start to key in a skill. Facebook Professional SkillsI don’t think every lawyer needs to stop what they are doing to get their skills in Facebook nor do law firm marketing departments need get every lawyer to add their skills to their Facebook profile. You have too many other fish to fry.

But this should draw the interest of professionals. Facebook users, which is basically everyone you now, will in the future be able to leverage  their social connections to find someone with particular skills. A person looking to hire someone with a particular skill could run a query using Graph Search and your name could appear.

My advice? When you have a second enter your professional skills. I did some quick testing and their are categories such as Patent, Estate Planning, and Eminent Domain, Criminal Law, Law, International Law, etc. The fact that there may be few in the category is an advantage.

As I have blogged many times, don’t be so fast to dismiss Facebook for business development, as a consumer or corporate lawyer. It’s too big and too heavily used by everyone. And used in ways to search for people that you and I may not conduct a search — such as for a professional with a particular skill in my town.

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