How you can become social media savvy?

“Don’t use social media to impress people, use it to impact people” – DaveWillis.org

In today’s scenario, social media plays a pivotal role in influencing your networks and connections. The platform lets you provide information in seconds and further giving your networks a way to collaborate, contribute and connect. A lot of us know that social media is important and is the way forward but lack the knowledge of how to make use of it.

Do you think you should be on social media but don’t know where to start? What should you post, and how often should you post it? What's more powerful, a like or a retweet?

Here I am going to list down few guidelines or tips that and can be helpful to build your own personal and professional brand and further making you social media savvy.

What you can do in regards to build your personal brand? How can you develop your professional brand and how to use social media for career or business development.

1. To Build your own personal brand you need to create a social account in all the major social platforms available to you like LinkedIn, Twitter to name a few.
2. Fully update your social media accounts and delete any old social media accounts you no longer use
3. Build a consistent persona of all your social media accounts
4. Identify your areas of expertise or interest areas. Follow people or groups or pages of your interest.
5. Share content on regular basis. The more you post, more the engagement. Create a frequency that best suits your needs.
6. Leverage your existing network. Import contacts from your existing email accounts like Gmail or Outlook or contact from your phone to social media. 
7. Keep your account feed positive. Do not post any negative or discouraging content. Be mindful of the posts you share.
8. Engage and Interact with your connections.
9. Don’t restrict yourself from only posting a certain type of content. Experiment and understand what attract and builds your personal brand.
10. Most importantly, have fun and not consider this as a task. Have mobile apps downloaded so that you can be active, responsive on the go and whenever you like

Few social media platforms and how they can be of help to you;

LinkedIn:

It is the quintessential professional network and personally feel that it’s the one that’s not used as optimally as it should be. In my opinion, LinkedIn works best when you use it as a career management tool and not just for job hunting.

• LinkedIn provides you a larger network base that you have like your work colleagues or company followers. It helps you connect with people you may already know or people you should know or people you should follow.
• Learn to use the recommendation feature to give and receive recommendations for people you have worked with in the past.
• Depending upon your business, LinkedIn helps you in recruiting or generating sales.
• It helps you create a company page or company group which is building an online community.

Twitter:

1 in 3 people generally find twitter very confusing and hard to understand its usage. In fact a lot of people create twitter accounts and not use it at all and mostly kept ideal.          

What is the advantage of using Twitter?

• It provides information in quick snippets which makes it easy to read and understand. The concept of micro-blogging works well with this platform.
• The hashtag search makes twitter on top of the list compared to other social media accounts in terms of searches done through hashtags
• It helps in advertising for business and hiring too.

Dos and Don’ts for beginners on Twitter:

1. Ensure your Twitter Profile is up to date with updated profile picture and Bio
2. Understand the difference between Retweet (RTs), Tweet, Reply, Direct Messages (DMs)
3. Make use of pinned tweets option, this will help you highlight a tweet you would like your follower to see when they visit your page
4. Be consistent with posting content and try posting content which is visually appealing like photos or videos.
5. Very importantly, use relevant hashtags when creating a post to reach the right audience and to get more eyeballs onto your content.
6. Follow people who can add value basis your criteria. Follow people/ groups/ companies who post relatable content
7. Don’t spam people’s direct message inbox
8. Do not post negative content or any content that can create a negative impact.

Instagram:

Instagram is a great platform for businesses to want to showcase their products , showcase creativity and attract customers by visual appeal. With great images one can show the true beauty of your products. This can really help build network and followers and build a great audience for your page.

• Features like Instagram stories, helps you tell stories through photos and videos and last for 24 hours to view. IGTV content on Instagram can help keep advertisement videos for viewers. The Live option on Instagram can help bridge the gap of not able to see the products as the business can demonstrate the products through live platform.
• Instagram can also be used to interact and follow companies. One can learn about company’s culture, employee engagement photos & videos or have a sneak peak into company’s ways of working.

For detailed usage. Check out this link: https://help.instagram.com/307876842935851

There are more platforms like Snapchat who are coming out in this similar space and hoping they will be equally helpful for businesses and recruiters.

Facebook

It is not even debatable that Facebook has the largest network compared to all the platforms we talked about above. Facebook is a worldwide phenomenal used by companies extensively at large.

• Facebook lets you create company pages, company groups, discussions on these groups and also help promote and apply to the jobs. Similar to Instagram, Facebook Live allows to connect with the network at large easily and quickly. Every company can use this feature as per their best needs and requirements.
• Facebook is more extensively used for personal branding than professional as per my view; however, it can be leveraged for the later even more. The company pages/groups allows you to share updates, reports that one may miss out on a company’s career page.
• From a job seeker perspective, Facebook lists down all the job posts and makes it easy for the job seeker to apply and also message/connect with the recruiter of the job listing. On the other hand, a recruiter can use their personal profile to promote jobs and company updates.

YouTube

YouTube channel is a great way to create videos specific to your needs . It can range from customer centric videos , employee engagement videos, company overview , Learning and Development videos, Recruitment and Selection videos and the list goes on.

• YouTube can be extensively used for business purpose. All you need is to Setup a channel, sign in, create and upload.
• Few interesting features of YouTube are YouTube Live , Advertisement on YouTube, Partnering with You-tubers for branding, YouTube partner program and YouTube Premium. These can be used basis the needs of the user and can definetly help in promoting both personal and professional development

These are my personal views and experiences shared thorough this blog. Please free to comment and share your ideas on this topic. Happy to connect to discuss more.

#happysharing #socialmedia #recruiter #linkedin #twitter #facebook #youtube #blog #branding