Small businesses make a lot of mistakes when it comes to LinkedIn — but it’s a platform that can be enormously useful to them. One of the 8 mistakes I cite in this piece for The Wall Street Journal‘s Report on Small Business is to focus excessively on lead gen. As I say in the story:

Don’t focus on lead generation. A sales team should use LinkedIn to identify prospects; a small company can make that easier by encouraging everyone in the company to connect with one another on LinkedIn, so that they share networks. But they shouldn’t expect their company page to be a source of inbound leads if they don’t have the kind of advertising budget that big companies use to drive LinkedIn traffic. Instead, a small firm should polish and update its page only often enough to attest to its credentials, professionalism and experience.

Read the whole story on The Wall Street Journal‘s website.