by Caroline Leach | Nov 26, 2017 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
In the business world, there are many year-end activities you can apply to your social media strategy for building your career.
What are they? Completing the year’s priorities. Assessing performance for you and your team. Closing the books. Celebrating the season. Connecting with people. Assessing upcoming trends. Setting new strategies and goals.
Here’s a checklist to consider for your own year-end plans as you build your career through social media.
FINISH PRIORITIES AND ASSESS PERFORMANCE
Reflect on how you did on this year’s social media goals. If you set a game plan for the year, see where you did well and what you want to do better in the future.
My plan was to:
(1) amplify my employer’s social media strategy through its Social Circle
(2) give corporate professionals a roadmap to build their career through social media with this blog (note: opinions are my own)
(3) share appropriate highlights of my work in social media
(4) learn how social media is evolving by experimenting with platforms and listening to podcasts, and
(5) help people in my network by sharing and commenting on their content.
Overall, I made progress in every area, even if I didn’t reach every numerical goal. I didn’t share many highlights of my work in social media, because some of it wasn’t content that should be posted in a public forum.
One exciting exception was sharing the news that my employer was named to Fortune’s 2017 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. As part of a cross-functional team dedicated to making the company a great place to work for all, I was thrilled to see this recognition and shared it in social media.
Apply your social media activity to your performance assessment. If you’ve been using social media to document your professional life, your feeds become another valuable input to summarize your performance.
You can sift through your posts and articles as reminders of the highlights of the year’s accomplishments. If some of the posts performed particularly well with audience engagement or business impact, you could incorporate those numbers into your performance assessment.
Once your self assessment is done, you have a valuable document to use to update your LinkedIn profile with accomplishments, projects, organizations, awards, and so on. Decide if you want to make tweaks to your profiles in other social platforms, to keep them aligned.
If you have visuals suitable for sharing in public, upload them to your LinkedIn profile to showcase your best work. Consider videos, photos, podcasts, slide decks, news releases and other visual representations. Err on the conservative side if you’re not sure if you should share information. When in doubt, don’t post.
CONNECT WITH YOUR NETWORK AND CELEBRATE THE SEASON
Make the most of social media for holiday networking events. Consider the social media aspect of the event, which I covered in another post.
Stephanie Vozza has a great piece in December’s issue of Fast Company with ideas about how to prepare.
“See who’s going,” says Dorie Clark author of Stand Out Networking. “The event organizer will often publish the names and bios of the people who’ll be there. Get a head start by identifying who you want to meet.”
Judy Robinett, author of How to Be a Power Connector suggests offering to volunteer. “This will allow you access to key leaders who can make key introductions.”
She also advises doing “an internet and social media search of people you want to meet, so you have something meaningful to talk about or ask.” She suggests reaching out in advance via social media.
Reconnect with people. As you’re scrolling through your social media feeds, make an extra effort to post comments for people you want to strengthen and refresh your connections with. A comment or a share means so much more to your network than a like.
SHARE HOLIDAY GREETINGS
Create your holiday greeting posts for your social networks. How will you wish your networks a happy holiday season? Are there inspiring leadership quotes you want to share? Valuable and timely articles you want to post? A fun holiday photo or video with your team to wish your business partners all the best?
To spark your creativity, look at how others are posting about the season. What resonates with you? What would you do differently?
Check out #holiday hashtags for business. Think about what hashtags you’ll use for your holiday posts to make your content more discoverable. Here’s a hashtag calendar resource for the whole year, to help with the holidays and your planning for the new year.
Take a inclusive approach to your hashtags, keeping in mind that a variety of holidays are celebrated at the end of the year.
ASSESS TRENDS AND ACCELERATE LEARNING
Check out trends for the new year. In an upcoming post, I’ll summarize the big trends ahead for building your career through social media. It will build on the format from last year with my post on how social media will change for professionals in the coming year.
Pick one new thing you want to learn. Based on the trends, what do you most want to learn? What are you most interested in? Although my social media trends post is still be researched and written, a big area of focus for me will be video. How can I incorporate more video into my social strategy? How can I tell stories with short videos?
Find a new podcast to learn from while you commute. The ones I’ve been enjoying are:
The Science of Social Media with Brian Peters and Hailley Griffis
Social Pros with Jay Baer and Adam Brown, and
Why I Social with Christopher Barrows.
These turn my commute time into learning time, making it easier to stay up to date and pick up new ideas.
Identify an experiment to conduct. In each of the last two years, I’ve done a 30-day experiment. This year it was seeing what would happen when I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. Last year it was blogging every day for a month.
In the year ahead I’m contemplating primary research on how corporate professionals are building their careers through social media.
PLAN FOR THE NEW YEAR
Pick a theme for the year. A theme for your year gives you a rallying cry that focuses your efforts. It helps you prioritize what to focus on and what to ignore. Here’s how author Gretchen Rubin picks a one-word theme. For the last sever years I’ve had an annual theme, and I’ll cover this in an upcoming post.
Set your #socialmediagoals for the new year. What did you learn from this year’s social media activity? What are the trends for the new year? What do you want to learn? These are all questions to ask yourself as you create a fresh set of goals.
Clear the decks. Just as you clean up your physical and digital workspace by deleting old files, updating contacts, and so on, do the same for your social media accounts.
Clear out the message cache for each platform. You don’t have to respond to everything. Go through pending connection requests on LinkedIn. Here’s a strategy for which invitations to accept. Start the new year fresh.
What’s on your year-end social media checklist?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 6, 2017 | Learning, Social Media
Do you have a social savvy strategy for the next conference you’re attending?
This is top of mind for me this week. I couldn’t be more excited to attend the The 2017 MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership, which starts tonight.
With the recent film Hidden Figures, I look forward to hearing from Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, pictured above, and the other luminary women and men who will be speaking.
My employer is a sponsor of the conference, and I could not be more proud. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Here are some ideas about making the most of your conference experience in social media.
PROMOTE
How can you amplify awareness of the conference and its goals?
- Check out the social media plan for the conference. For MAKERS, this came in a series of pre-event emails with sample messages and great content to share.
- Know and use the relevant hashtag(s). #BEBOLD is the MAKERS hashtag. It’s perfect because it stands out in all caps and its brevity saves characters.
- Share pre-conference information in your social networks. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I’ve shared content in Twitter and LinkedIn.
CONNECT
How can you get to know new people you can learn from?
- Check out the attendance list in advance. If anyone already in your network is attending, you can reconnect as well as identify new people you want to meet.
- Be active in the event app – or in a social media group. Add your picture and key info to your app profile. Send messages to people you want to meet in person.
- Introduce yourself to 5 to 10 new people at each session. A goal to say hello to a focused number of people makes connections meaningful and manageable.
SHARE
How can you share valuable content with your social networks?
GROW
What can you do after a conference to share the learnings, increase the impact and grow the new network connections you made?
- Share with your colleagues. Post a summary for appropriate groups in your company’s social intranet or present it in a face-to-face meeting.
- Take one new action. Commit to doing one thing that will make a difference. My #BEBOLD action will be the subject of a future post.
How do you make the most of a conference experience in social media?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 8, 2017 | Corporate Communications, Learning, Social Media
It’s a new year. It’s time for a fresh set of goals. And it’s critical to think about them in novel and different ways.
In your professional life, how will you use social media to achieve your goals? How will you use social media to tell your story about your wins?
To start, think about how social media will change for professionals this year. Check out the post, along with Dorie Clark, Alexandra Samuel, Bryan Kramer and William Arruda for some fascinating ideas.
Then ask yourself these 4 questions to make your own social media game plan.
- What are your company’s big goals? Is your CEO sharing the company strategy with employees this month or quarter? How about other C-suite leaders? Access any and all public information about your company’s strategic plans for the year. Be clear on the top goals and the order of priority. And be sure what you share in social media is public information only.
- What are your team’s goals? How do the company goals translate into your department’s goals and ultimately your team’s goals? Where does your team help drive the strategy toward execution? What new and different approaches can you and your team try this year?
- What are your professional goals? How do your team goals translate into your own professional goals? What do you need to accomplish this year? What stretch assignments do you want to tackle? On the development side, what do you want or need to learn? How will you accomplish that?
- How will use use social media to achieve your goals and tell your story? Does social media play a role in achieving your goals? If it hasn’t before, could you incorporate it this year? When you achieve goals, how will you use social media to tell your story? What conferences are you attending? Where are you speaking? What are you blogging?
At this point, focus on “what” your goals will be. Don’t worry about the “how” at this point.
Why?
If you’re not sure about how to execute a goal, that can stand in the way of setting it in the first place. And just because you don’t exactly know how to do it, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
You’ve probably had many “first times” in your career. What did you do when your boss asked you to take on a new project, something you’d never done before? You can reflect on and use those experiences in the same way when you get to the “how” part of actually accomplishing your goals.
A former boss came to me some years ago and said the CEO wanted to do an employee engagement survey. My boss asked me to lead it.
That was beyond my role at the time as a corporate communications leader. There was a moment of terror, but after a few minutes it sounded like a fascinating project.
In thinking through the “how,” I realized I could build on the communications-related surveying I’d done, engage with experts and partners, create a team, map out a plan, execute it, learn and adjust as we went.
With so much information available online, you can research any topic and come up with ideas. Being able to figure it out is a skill that becomes more important every day.
I’m ever inspired by a talk that business leader Mark Cuban gave at my employer’s headquarters many years ago.
Most striking were his words about client meetings and commitments. A client would ask for something, and the group would agree it would be delivered the next day.
Later, Mark and his colleagues would look at each other and say they had no idea how to do what they’d just committed to. But they had all night to figure it out. And figure it out, they did. Time and time again.
If they could do it, so could I. And so can you.
For now, take some time to set your social media goals for the year.
Here are mine:
- Amplify my employer’s social media strategy through its Social Circle, by sharing 3 posts each week.
- Share appropriate highlights of my work in social media, by posting something at least 2 times a month.
- Learn about how social media is changing and evolving, by listening to 5 podcasts each week during drive time.
- Help others by sharing and commenting on their valuable content, at least 3 times a week.
Each goal is measurable, with a number attached to it. As the year goes on, I’ll assess if this is the right frequency or if tweaks need to be made.
None of my goals have anything to do with followers. In part that’s because I can’t completely control those numbers. Sure, the goals I’m pursuing are likely to attract followers. But I’m focused on actions I can 100% control on my own.
Here I’m influenced by Gary V‘s ideas on Building a Personal Brand, a Udemy course I finished today. One of the biggest takeaways? “Consistency almost trumps everything,” Gary says.
Another pearl from Gary? This one is for combating fear of failure: “Spend all your time in the in-between space, the time between starting and stopping.”
What’s your social media game plan for the year?
Don’t worry yet about the “how” of making it happen. “How” will be the subject of many future posts.
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