by Caroline Leach | Mar 30, 2020 | Careers, Social Media
Life can change in an instant.
A month ago, who knew we’d be staying at home to help flatten the curve of coronavirus?
Yet as humans we’re wired for connection. Without it, we wither away. So how can we keep in touch in a responsible way when we need to practice social distancing?
It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with during the last few weeks. Why? I believe in sharing content on social media only when there’s something interesting, informative, and/or inspirational to say. It’s about being a bit of a social media contrarian, and doing something different from others. That’s why I’ve been quieter than usual on social media.
I’ve been observing, thinking, and questioning. What does coronavirus and its many implications mean for us? Where are we headed? How will our world change? What are ways we can get ahead of it? How can we help ourselves and others during turbulent times?
In the midst of taking it all in, I noticed something counter-intuitive on LinkedIn. Even though I’m posting less content, my profile views started to increase.
In “normal times,” the less often I posted, the fewer profile views I got. However, I started seeing the opposite. What was turning this social media “truth” on its head in the last few weeks?
To help find out, I decided to connect with some of the people who viewed my profile. As is my practice and recommendation, I sent personalized invitations. I thanked people for viewing my profile, commented on something I could find in common, and asked to connect with them.
The speed of people’s replies surprised me, especially on a Sunday evening. The more heartfelt and open nature of people’s replies were also surprising and touching.
This underscored what in retrospect should have been obvious — people are hungering. And not only that. Depending on their industry, they often have more time to establish professional relationships.
Technology in various forms, including social media, gives us multiple opportunities for connection. Here are a few ideas …
Reach out to one or two people each day
An email or a text to touch base with someone can be a real day brightener — for the recipient and for you. Ideally, that message is sent without any agenda other than to say hello and check on how they’re doing.
Of course, share a bit about what’s new with you and how you’re adjusting to our stay-at-home world. Include a photo or a short video if that makes sense.
You could also take it to another level and connect via Zoom, Skype, or other video-based medium. Every few weeks I’m doing this with a variety of colleagues and friends to share ideas and inspiration. In the personal realm, my sister and I are doing Zoom calls with our parents on Sunday mornings.
Connect with new people on LinkedIn
Consider everyone you come across on LinkedIn as someone you can potentially build a relationship with. People who viewed your profile are an option. Also look at the voices showing up in your LinkedIn feed.
If they’re second- or third-level connects who you find interesting, send them a personalized connection request. Tell them why your content attracted your attention as well as a bit about you. Keep it friendly and lighthearted.
This is not the time to ask for anything other than a connection. You can build a relationship over time from there. To make sure compelling people show up in your feed, follow hashtags of interest on LinkedIn by typing terms of interest into the search bar.
Identify aspirational relationships you’d like to build
In many industries, people have more time on their hands right now. That may make them more open to meeting new people. Who are the thought leaders in your industry? Who are the leaders in your company? Who are authors and influencers you admire?
Start making a list of who you’d like to build a relationship with over time. Okay, it may not ever be the moment to try to build a relationship with Oprah. But there are plenty of other incredible people who are more accessible on social media than ever.
Put your requests out there, keeping it light and friendly and not asking for anything. Once you do connect, make a point to follow the person’s content and comment on it as appropriate.
And if people don’t respond to your requests, don’t take it personally. It’s probably not you. Some people don’t check LinkedIn frequently and may not have even seen your request.
These are just a few ways you can network while working from home in your favorite athleisure. What are some of the ways you are building strong connections from home?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 8, 2020 | Careers, Social Media
The “rules” of social media are clear-cut and straightforward, right?
There are rules for the time of day you should post, the frequency of your posts, and the formula for your content.
All you have to do is follow these rules, and you’ll win on social media, right?
Um, no.
Following the rules might make you boring, turn off people in your network, and even slow down your career progress.
Instead, look at what everyone else is doing, and do something different. Do something that is true to you. Share content that only you could create.
For example, how many LinkedIn posts did you see that simply said “Happy New Year,” along with an image?
Did that add anything to your professional life? Tell you anything new? Help you be better in your work?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, then don’t feel compelled to post content. Just don’t.
Better to skip sharing anything than to post something that doesn’t educate or entertain your network.
That’s why I didn’t share any new year’s day messages. There wasn’t anything new or different I felt I could add to the conversation.
But I didn’t stay away from social media entirely. To the contrary. It was the ideal time to engage with others. It was a perfect moment to comment on or share their content, spark a conversation, and strengthen our relationship.
So for those times when you don’t feel you have anything informative, interesting, or entertaining to share, ramp up the time you spend engaging with others’ content.
Beyond that, how can you make your content more interesting?
Create your own data
I keep a number of Excel spreadsheets to track everything from the performance of my social media minute videos to the messages I send to people on my email list. I’ve tracked data from experiments on what happens from posting daily on LinkedIn. I’ve conducted my own research on how people use social media to boost their careers.
In each of these cases, I have something completely unique to share with my network. And they’re topics that can help others with their social media presence. Not surprisingly, writing about what my own data tells me has led to some of my higher performing LinkedIn articles. These are the ones with the most engagement as measured by the quality and quantity of the comments.
What data could you track that would help you in your own work, as well as help your network?
Look at the world in new ways
Conventional wisdom gets turned on its head every second with how fast the world is changing. As the new year approached, my social media feeds were filling up with posts about how to slay the work world right out of the gate. It felt like everyone was queuing up for a big race that began bright and early on the first Monday of the new year. Who could get going faster and go longer and better than anyone else?
And I realized that’s a fool’s errand. All that will do is exhaust me and everyone around me. What might work better instead? Well, I planned a winter break in late December that was both relaxing and productive. There was special time with family and friends, and there was time to reflect on and plan my business for the coming year. The first weekend of the year, I started working on key projects.
The first Monday back, I chose a contrarian activity. I went to a relaxing spot about five minutes from my house. I enjoyed a great latte and some quiet, contemplative time to “officially” start my work year (that’s the picture above and on Instagram). It felt calm and peaceful and totally different from what everyone else might have been doing.
When everyone is zigging, how could you zag?
Be real and be vulnerable
The blog posts and LinkedIn articles that got the most engagement tended to be those where I shared my struggles. Being Active on Social Media When Your Life Explodes was my most viewed article in 2019. Why? Probably because I shared my challenges in getting my first book published. Sure, I had goals, plans, and self-imposed deadlines. But what do you do when life intervenes? Based on the comments people shared, that realness resonated.
Launching a business, as I’ve done over the last year, is exhilarating and terrifying, all at the same time. Sometimes on social media we can get so focused on sharing the high points that we neglect to talk about what it really takes. What happens behind the scenes. How much grunt work is truly involved.
In the coming year, I’ll share more of that. So I can paint a balanced picture of this entrepreneurial life. The highs. The lows. The progress. The setbacks. Because I’ve learned that realness is what we all crave. And that’s contrary to the images of perfection we’ve been conditioned to share on social media.
The best example is when I sent personalized LinkedIn invitations to a few hundred people at a leadership conference I attended. It took several hours over a period of a few days to send all the invites. Why did I do this? I wanted to grow my connections and relationships with people who have common interests.
One person looked at my profile and invited me to lunch. When we met, she invited me to speak at an association where she was the board president. Several months later, I spoke about how to boost your career and organization through social media. My talk generated a large volume of social media content.
Someone across the country saw the content. As a result, he invited me to do a paid speaking engagement at his organization. He also purchased a few hundred copies of my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media.
Both speaking engagements were highly enjoyable events, where I met fascinating people that I keep in touch with to this day.
More than a year went by between the leadership conference and the second speaking engagement. And it was such a thrill the way it played out. It’s important for me to share the story behind the story. There was a lot of work involved. It wasn’t clear where it would lead. Yet it illustrates that doing the work and trying to be helpful to others can lead to exciting outcomes.
How do you share the real deal on social media?
by Caroline Leach | Dec 18, 2019 | Careers, Social Media
To boost your career through social media in 2020, what social media trends are important for professionals? What can you apply from digital marketing to your work life? And what will most easily fit in your busy schedule?
There are three social media trends for professionals worth considering. How did they rise to the top?
As a start, sifting through dozens of social media trend reports over the last few weeks yielded significant data and insights.
Next, reflecting on the experiences my clients, my colleagues, and I have had on social media gave new perspectives on what’s changing.
Lastly, learning from the weekly industry news sharing in the class on social media I taught this fall rounded out the trends.
Here they are …
Private groups are the new black
More and more, social media is migrating away from public feeds into private groups with a curated group of members who have common interests. People are looking for more authentic and more meaningful interactions on social media.
Part of it may be a desire to skip the often negative parts of social media, in our polarized times in the world. Another big part is the role of Facebook, which has declared, “the future is private” in its strategy to integrate Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
For professionals, the biggest implication is the value of groups on LinkedIn. You can foster stronger relationships in groups related to your professional interests, among people with common interests. You can learn from each other and share relevant information. You can become better known among people who are the most meaningful for your career.
Joining LinkedIn private groups — meaning those that are unlisted — requires that you be invited by the group administrator. By connecting with new people frequently and sharing valuable content with your network, you may find yourself invited to join private groups.
In addition, joining groups, whether listed or unlisted, enables you to expand your LinkedIn network, which in turn makes it easier for people to find you.
You can even start your own group, if you want to create your own curated community of people who can support and learn from each other. And you can join up to 100 groups. Find new ones by using the LinkedIn search bar.
Video eats the web
The rise of video isn’t the newest trend, but it’s certainly accelerating. Cisco predicts that 81% of world’s internet traffic will be video by 2021. As someone who loves the written word, I find this a bit challenging. But it’s hard to deny the data on video traffic and engagement.
This year I experimented with social media minute videos on LinkedIn. The purpose? To share tips from my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media: A Short Guide to Boosting Your Career.
While my LinkedIn articles this year got views of up to 500+, my videos often performed up to five times better. The top performing video attracted more than 2,500 views. Of course, there’s a bigger commitment to reading an article or blog post than watching a one-minute video with captions.
There’s also a much bigger investment of time in writing an article than recording a video. So consider how you could incorporate more video into your professional updates in the coming year. Because the majority of people scroll through their social media feeds without sound, captions are a must. If you’re looking for an easy captioning option, check out Rev.com.
Instagram is your contacts list
Instagram for work, really? Bear with me for a moment. A strong presence on LinkedIn is a professional must. It seemed for a while that Twitter was the secondary place for professionals to share their ideas. However, with the tremendous growth in Instagram (1 billion+ monthly actives and counting), I believe it’s now the next-best place to share about your career, your colleagues and your company.
Instagram is also an easy way to connect with someone you just met in a professional setting. All you do is follow each other Instagram, and voila, you’re connected with a single tap. In fact, Taylor Lorenz of The Atlantic explores How Instagram Replaced the Contacts List.
If you will be hiring talent in the coming year among millennials or Gen Z, being on Instagram is a must. Potential job candidates will want to know what you’re like as a leader and decide whether they’d like to work with you. With unemployment still at historic lows, a vibrant Instagram feed of engaging content can help you attract great people.
And don’t forget about Instagram stories. With 500 million+ daily actives with stories, this is where much of the daily action can be found. Stories give you an opportunity to take a bit lighter and more playful approach to the workplace. You can save the ones you like to your highlights, and let others disappear after the designated 24 hours.
What if your Instagram is currently more focused on your personal life? If you don’t want to mix the professional and personal, you could consider making your account private for your friends and family. You can then open a second account that’s public and focused on your professional life.
What About TikTok?
TikTok is enjoying cool-kid status, for sure. TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company. It reportedly has 800 million monthly active users worldwide, and it’s growing like wildfire.
How should you think about Tik Tok from a professional perspective? Because it’s so new, yet growing by leaps and bounds, it’s something to keep an eye on. Be sure to learn about it. Check out how people and brands are using it, and how that usage evolves. But you don’t need to add it to your professional arsenal just yet.
Just One Thing
If you do just one thing on social media in 2020, make it a commitment to sharing high-quality content with your network. What have you learned that could help others? What have you discovered that could inspire people in their work lives? What are you most excited about in your work life?
Share that.
What is the one thing you will do on social media in the coming year?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 30, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
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!
by Caroline Leach | Sep 17, 2019 | Social Media
What’s one thing you should never do after someone accepts a LinkedIn connection request?
Don’t ask for anything.
Don’t ask for a job. Don’t ask to meet for coffee. Don’t ask to set up a phone call. Don’t ask about the person’s goals.
Just. Don’t. Ask.
These words of advice turned out to be the most viewed topic so far in my weekly social media minute videos. In them I share tips from my book, What Successful People Do in Social Media.
What To Do Instead
What’s better to do instead?
Anything that will help solidify the relationship.
Share a warm greeting. Congratulate someone on a recent accomplishment. Offer up something that may be of interest that doesn’t take too much of the recipient’s time. Maybe you saw an article or a video they might find helpful. If you want to pass it along with no obligation to read or watch it, that’s great. Simply focus on building the relationship.
Think about how you react when people immediately start pitching business to you — what I call spamming — right after you’ve connected on LinkedIn or other social media platform. More and more, it happens before the connection itself. Now I simply decline those requests. It’s clear as soon as I accept I’ll be bombarded with offers for services I don’t need right now or requests for meetings I can’t do right now, if ever.
When I first left the corporate world to start my own business, it was financial planners who contacted me. Now it’s people pitching lead generation services. Recently someone claimed they can guarantee story placements in major media outlets. As someone with an accreditation in public relations, I can say it’s never possible to guarantee a media placement. Maybe they were really pitching paid advertising.
Learning from what not to do, there’s a better strategy.
What is it?
Let Your Goals Guide You
Consider your professional goals for the coming season, quarter, or year. Do you want to get a new job? Position yourself for a promotion? Find great new talent for your team? Get asked to be on a non-profit board? Be invited to speak?
Write down your goals, and then identify who can help them become reality.
- If you want a new job, create a list of job types of interest, both at your current employer and other companies
- If you want to be promoted, consider who, in addition to your boss, will have a say in the decision
- If you want to find new talent, think about the skill sets you’d like to find to round out your team
- If you want to be invited to be on a non-profit board, identify specific causes and organizations of interest
- If you want to be invited to speak, think about where you’d like to speak and who might hire you to do so.
Next, look to the people associated with the group and organizations you identified. Who do you already know? Who would you like to get to know? You can use the search feature in LinkedIn to further refine a list of people of interest.
Raise Your Profile with Key People
After that, create a plan to raise your profile with the people you identified. Start by sending a personalized LinkedIn request. Say why you want to connect and what interests you about them. Follow them on Instagram, Twitter or YouTube … wherever they spend most of their social time.
Then keep an eye out for content they share. Scroll through your feeds once or twice a week. Read or watch what they post. Start to engage with their content in a meaningful way. Comment on something that stood out to you. Share how your thinking has changed or what you might do differently as a result. Offer up additional data points or perspectives. Do it in a helpful way, and not to try to show you’re smarter or more informed.
The secret is to find the right balance, not engaging so frequently that you become annoying, or so infrequently that you don’t make any lasting impression.
The best outcome is to start building a mutually satisfying relationship. It’s ideal to build one where the other person enjoys and even looks forward to your comments. And one where the other person is positively motivated to engage in a conversation with you.
Find the Strategic Serendipity
Another way of thinking of this is called strategic serendipity. By engaging with and helping people in your network with a positive approach, you never know what good things might come your way.
In my case it’s been social media consulting clients, business and leadership coaching clients, speaking engagements, and teaching opportunities. Exactly zero of them resulted from my searching through social media, cold pitching services to people I don’t know. Instead, they came as the outcome of being helpful, in a targeted way, consistent with my top goals.
To make it easy to fit this into your busy life, you can create a note in your smartphone of people you want to make a point of engaging with. Set aside a few brief times each week to scroll through your social media feeds and interact with their recent content. Be as helpful as you can. Make it easy and enjoyable to engage with you. And let the strategic serendipity flow.
How have you built relationships in positive ways?
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