It’s almost the end of the year. Do you want an easy way to gather your accomplishments for a year-end performance review?
You may be preparing for a performance discussion with your manager in the corporate world. Or maybe you run your own company and want to identify how you did this year.
In either scenario, reflecting on this year’s highlights helps you clearly see what you did well and where you can improve. It’s an opportunity to pause and celebrate the accomplishments of you and year team. It’s a chance to elevate what’s working well and make changes to what’s not working well.
But in the rush of meeting year-end goals, how can you simplify the process?
Try looking to your social media feeds. If you’ve been sharing consistently what you, your team, and your company have been doing, you have a ready-made record. (Of course, this presumes you follow your organization’s social media policy and haven’t shared any confidential, private, or sensitive information.)
A former colleague (and now an author!), Angelica Kelly, has a year-end ritual that relies on LinkedIn. “At the end of every year, I take stock of the personal and professional. I consider what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve,” Kelly says.
“After this reflection process, I use LinkedIn like a notepad and do an annual update,” she says. “Everything professionally relevant goes into my LinkedIn profile. This includes accomplishments, interests, volunteering, and big projects that highlight transferable skills and new knowledge I’ve gained.”
In addition to Angelica’s approach, if you posted content to LinkedIn or other social networks throughout the year, you can scroll through your posts to identify the highlights. You can capture instances where you and your team:
Launched a successful new product
Completed an important project
Won an award for your accomplishments
Spoke at a company or industry event
Attended a conference and applied new knowledge
Championed company news as a brand ambassador
After that, here are a few things to consider …
1. Link your achievements to the goals you set at the beginning of the year, as well as your bigger department and company goals. Does your social media content show how you made a difference for your company? Did you contribute to some of your company’s key goals and share about those (to the extent you could) on social media?
2. Quantify how others responded to your accomplishments. See what data you can cite from your social media posts. Did your content reach a large number of people? Generate multiple comments and a dialogue on an important work topic? Get shared in a way that helped build your organization’s reputation as an industry leader or a great place to work? Use numbers to quantify the impact of your social sharing.
3. Identify where you got feedback. Perhaps some of your posts served as mini feedback moments on some of your work. Did people make suggestions for improvements that you ended up using? Did people ask for more information so they could apply your learning to their own work? Social media can serve as an online focus group. See if that was the case for you this year.
As you reflect on this year, it’s also a great time to lay the foundation for the coming year. Are there new and different ways you could share successes and learnings on social media? Would you use social media activity to seek feedback and help solve problems? How could you hit what I call the social media trifecta — sharing equally about you, your team, and your organization?
With the year — and the decade! — coming to a close, I hope you reflect on and celebrate the accomplishments you and your team achieved this year. And if you have rituals you use to make the most of your performance review preparation, please share!
Ah, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It’s the last one of the year. A time to spend with family and friends. A time to reflect on the past and its lessons. A time to plan for the future.
And a time to take a few actions to close out your social media strategy for the year and get it ready for the coming year. Here are six strategies for what could become an annual ritual. You don’t have to do them all. Just pick and choose what speaks to you the most.
Reflect on your accomplishments and update your social media. A former colleague Angelica Kelly is the inspiration for this one. Every year she says she “takes stock of the personal and professional, considering what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve.”
She uses LinkedIn “like a notepad” to do an annual update after her reflection process. She puts everything professionally relevant in her LinkedIn profile. This includes accomplishments, interests, volunteering, and big projects that highlight her transferrable skills and new knowledge she’s gained.
If you did a year-end performance assessment as part of your job, you can easily flow those updates into your LinkedIn profile. You could also look at your Twitter, Instagram and other profiles to see if anything should be refreshed.
Assess your social media activity against your goals. Did you want to ramp up your engagement with any particular social platform? Share more content relevant to your professional interests? Build your network and connect with a diverse group of people?
See how you did against any social goals you set at the beginning of the year. One of my big goals was to conduct social media research to understand in a data-focused way how professionals are using social media to build their careers. It was a big learning experience and something I plan to do annually.
Another goal was to start consulting with people on how to boost their careers in social media. I worked with a few people pro bono in the first half of the year to develop and refine my approach. You know who you are, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the opportunity.
This was invaluable when I my business The Carrelle Company was born on Labor Day. One of the most pleasant surprises was that my blogging and LinkedIn article writing generated a group of people interested in working with me.
Show your network some professional love. Take time to scroll through people’s content. By commenting on great content, you can easily connect with members of your network. That keeps you top of mind with people you care about, whether it’s for them to seek professional advice from you or consider you as a job candidate.
Think about who’s not in your social networks who should be. Sure, look at the algorithms to see who pops up. But also think about the projects you’ve worked on and the organizations you’ve been active in. There may be some people you should connect with. Or maybe there are some aspirational connections you’d like to make with people you want to get to know better.
Share your #bestnine2018 from Instagram if they are professional in nature. These could be your actual best performing posts of the year, or you could choose your favorite nine. Post them anytime up through New Year’s Eve, and share them in other networks like Twitter and LinkedIn.
Here are some tips from Dawn Geske writing for the International Business Times on how to do it. Also, scroll through the posts of others for ideas on content and captioning. Leave comments on ones that speak to you the most strongly. It’s a great opportunity to touch members of your network and share year-end greetings.
Listen, watch and read up on 2019 social media trends. Check out what experts are saying about what the new year will hold for social media, so you can up your own game for your career.
My main takeaway? Always focus on your audience and what’s in it for them.
In an upcoming post, I’ll do a roundup of the top trends for the coming year.
Consider a theme for the new year to guide your social efforts. Every year since 2011 I’ve had a theme word for my life, and that includes how I choose to show up in social media. Because I launched a new business in 2018, my theme word will have a lot to do with that.
Watch for more to come in an upcoming post about theme words. It will cover why they’re so powerful and how you could think about choosing a word that unifies and focuses all you do in the new year.
How else do you take stock of your year in social and get ready to shine brighter in a new one?
So says Angelica Kelly, the creative force behind the YouTube channel, You Brew Kombucha. Her 31 videos shot over a single summer weekend in 2017 have attracted 11,000 subscribers. All without advertising.
Why did she do it? How did she do it? And what is kombucha?
It’s “a beverage produced by fermenting sweet tea with a culture of yeast and bacteria.” And this sweetened tea is believed to have several health benefits, including boosting energy and immunity.
Angelica shared this with me one recent summer afternoon. We enjoyed a refreshing cup of cold green tea scented with jasmine she brought for our chat.
My first memory of Angelica is a Skype interview when she was a summer intern candidate at my employer (note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own).
She hit the ground running and never looked back. Her internship evolved into a full-time job as a corporate communications specialist. That led to a series of increasingly responsible roles. And she’s now a senior manager of internal communications at a new company.
Her Instagram posts started catching my eye over the last year. I wanted to learn more about her side gig. She was a fascinating candidate for my series of profiles on how professionals are boosting their careers through social media.
What I found was inspiration about learning, about experimenting and about exploring passions.
Here’s what Angelica shared …
Tell me about this tea we’re drinking.
It’s Chinese green tea, scented with jasmine. The cold brewing reduces the astringency. Good tea can be brewed over and over.
And all tea comes from essentially one plant – the camellia sinensis. I’m fascinated by how you can make so many teas from one plant.
Tea helps relax you and bring you back to nature. You’re literally just drinking a leaf.
How do you show up in social media?
There’s an unspoken belief that your work persona has to be different from your non-work persona. I believe they are one in the same. But people are multi-faceted, so there is a time and a place for certain topics.
Social media is all about using the available resources. You can share your knowledge and help others learn in social.
I’m on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube.
On Instagram I follow experts in fields of interest. I find them through hashtags and search. (BTW: her Instagram has the perfect summary: I strategize, I write, I read – for fun and for work. To recreate, I create. Check out one of my passion projects @youbrewkombucha on Insta + YouTube.)
My search process starts with books. Then I look online for the best sources of knowledge on the topic. I scour websites and blogs. I’ll follow my favorites’ social media handles and see who comments, who’s engaged and who’s asking or answering questions. And that’s how I connect to other learners.
On Facebook there are so many communities for niche groups. I’ve found home brewer groups for my kombucha research. There’s an interesting dynamic of knowledge sharing, and these are places to troubleshoot questions.
What else is unique about your research process?
It’s fun diving into a field where I feel out of my element. I read a lot of reference books. I borrow ebooks from the library through a great app called Libby, by OverDrive.
Learning is about allowing ourselves to be curious – to be fascinated by a topic. It’s important to be curious in all aspects of life and to go into things with a “beginner’s” mind.
Networking with people, asking questions and connecting with other enthusiasts and subject matter experts are all great ways to learn.
What are your LinkedIn rituals?
At the end of every year I take stock of the personal and professional. I consider what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve.
I use LinkedIn like a notepad and do an annual update after this reflection process. Everything professionally relevant goes into my LinkedIn profile. Accomplishments. Interests. Volunteering. Big projects that highlight transferable skills and new knowledge I’ve gained.
To understand what’s in the ecosystem, I follow and keep tabs on various companies. It’s also interesting to see how others see my company, through their comments and shares. As a communicator, understanding that external perception is crucial.
Why did you launch a YouTube channel?
This is my newest platform. As a viewer and consumer of content, I created the resource I wish existed for me. I couldn’t find a comprehensive YouTube channel on kombucha. I’m all about knowledge sharing, so I wanted to house everything I learned all in one place to make it easy for new learners.
My husband, Ryan, is a writer in the film industry. Together, we created three dozen videos over a weekend. He helped with planning the shoot, rigging the lighting, sequencing the segments and editing the footage.
Ryan understands the intricacies of video and where quality matters. For example, a mismatched quality of video and the heart of what I’m trying to convey could turn viewers off.
I’m a home brewer, not a professional expert. This is a passion project. So I wasn’t trying to make it look super polished. It has a low-budget feeling. It’s more realistic. It says “I’m one of you,” to my audience members, and that makes the topic more accessible.
In the process of shooting the videos I learned not to be camera shy. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s not about you. It’s about your audience and what they can learn.
People told me I should release the videos in phases. But I wanted to be the most comprehensive kombucha home brewer resource. So I released all the videos at once. I didn’t want any of it to be incomplete in any way. They’re like a 101 entry-level college course.
To promote them, I posted in the Facebook home brewer groups. Some groups are open to sharing of self-created resources, and others aren’t. But I trusted the information was good and that people who wanted it would find it.
And they did. In under a year, my subscribers grew to more than 11,000. I’ve enjoyed engaging with a small but zealous community of followers – or “discerning enthusiasts” as I like to call them. (I consider myself a discerning enthusiast too). Many of them are in the United States, and some are from as far away as Brazil and Australia.
What are the “do’s” you observe in social?
Be authentic and genuine. That’s the first thing. Just make it; never fake it till you make it.
Give credit. If you repost, find the source and give credit. This is important because the reason people make things is to create joy or inspire some other feeling or reaction. They deserve credit for their work.
Focus on things I’m doing and people I’m with. Those are so much more interesting than too many photos of me.
Teach somebody something or give a new perspective on something.
Let social media spark personal connections. Share your enthusiasm with others. Let it be a catalyst that leads you to dinner or afternoon tea with an old friend or a colleague.
Be careful about negative topics. But don’t sugarcoat like everything is perfect.
How does empathy guide your social involvement?
You never know what state of mind people are in when you put stuff out into the world. And I think about my own state. Rather than using social media as a venting platform that could bring someone else down, I’ll reach out to a circle of friends to talk.
This is so personal and unique to what works for each individual, but if I’m feeling negative, I don’t share in social unless it can spark a constructive dialogue or inspire positive change.
What’s next for you?
My kombucha and tea research is evolving into a focus on Chinese pottery. I’m learning about how different glazes and clays affect tea brewing. And that has led to looking into ceramics classes. That may be the next big thing. It’s all part of my personal quest to be curious in all aspects of life!
Are you as energized by Angelica as I am? Want to learn more about her? Here’s how you can connect:
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