‘Tis the season for social media trends for the coming year.
For what’s ahead in 2019, I read several articles. Expecting to see a preponderance of tech-related trends – such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and new platforms – I was surprised to conclude that the biggest trend is decidedly non-technical.
But let’s start at the beginning, with some of what I read and the three key trends I took away from it. My perspective on trends has to do with how they will help you grow your career and/or your company in the year ahead.
Worth a read or a listen on your own are the following:
From those sources and more, here are my three big takeaways for 2019 trends.
First, video continues its explosive growth. By 2021, video traffic is forecasted to be 81% of all traffic on the Internet. This is according to Cisco, in the 7 Marketing Trends for 2019.
The article has great stats on how Google searches more and more are including video. So not only is video a great way to make your content more discoverable, it’s increasingly the way people prefer to consume information.
Keep it short, under 30 seconds or so. Shoot vertical video. Experiment with documenting the non-proprietary parts of your work days to see what resonates the most with your networks.
Second, Instagram Stories are a must. Related to the ongoing video trend, Stories are “now growing 15 times faster than feed-based sharing” in Instagram, according to Hootsuite’s Top 5 Social Media Trends. In the next year, Stories will “surpass feeds as the primary way people share things.”
If you’re not yet using Stories to showcase what you’re doing in your work life, this is the year to experiment. Going to a conference? Giving a talk? Delivering on a big (non-proprietary) project? Volunteering in the community? These and many more are perfect for sharing in Stories.
To get started, begin viewing stories from others to see what resonates with you. Approach Stories with a learning mindset and have some fun by experimenting with the various features. Here’s a great guide from Hubspot to getting started with Stories and making them like a pro.
Third, social media success is all about quality content. Whether the form is videos, images or words, nearly every trend piece I read emphasized the importance of quality content. That gives you a multitude of opportunities to grow your career through social media this year.
Everything you do could lend itself to creating great content through short posts, articles, links, photos or videos. At the start of the year, look at what’s ahead month by month and start creating a high-level content calendar. Of course, as always, don’t post proprietary or competitively sensitive information.
Content planning is the key advice from Sunny Lenarduzzi, one of the experts featured in The Science of Social Media podcast. She says, “if you wait to the last minute or ignore creating a content calendar for the month, your content will suffer because you’re rushing everything.”
It’s also important to take time to get to know your audience and what’s important to them. In the same podcast, Donna Moritz from Socially Sorted was featured as advising to, “focus on creating quality, core content on a platform that you own (your blog/website, podcast or video) that helps solve your audience’s biggest challenges.”
Also highlighted, as Gary Vaynerchuk said in a recent interview, “My show and my social accounts are not a platform from which I talk about what’s important to me. It’s a platform from which I talk about what’s important to you.”
Ultimately, high-quality content is critical to your success because “it will help you show up on Google and it will help your posts show up and get more engagement on social media sites,” according to Bill Widmer in the Sumo marketing trends article.
The most important element of this content focus is that it’s something you can control. Your discipline in sharing content on a consistent basis with a point of view that adds value to your connections is what it’s all about.
No one else has experienced the work world in quite the same way as you have. No one else has the unique perspective that you do. Sharing your original content that adds values to the people in your network is the most important thing you can do in social media.
What trends are you focused on in the coming year?
In taking your journey toward them, do you want a fun way of getting there?
Here’s an idea. Choose a theme word for your year.
What’s that? It’s a single word you pick to characterize the kind of year you want to have.
While there’s a lot going on the world that is beyond each of our individual control, there’s one area of life where we have complete control. And that’s ourselves. Our thoughts. Our decisions about how to choose to show up in the world. Our choices about how to respond to adversity or to good fortune.
Our thoughts and feelings are powerful forces. A theme word can help focus and channel them toward action to achieve our deepest desires.
As I shared at the beginning of another new year, a theme for your year can help you in four ways.
First is MOTIVATION. A theme is a personal rallying cry you can apply to everything you do, in social media and in real life. It can give you the motivation to take small steps toward your goals, day after day. Big things happen through small, consistent actions.
Second is FOCUS. A theme is a continual reminder of what’s important to you. And what’s not. It helps you decide in an instant if you’re spending your time in the most important ways to you — and with the people who are important in your life.
Third is INTEGRATION. A theme brings everything in your life together, both professional and personal. Your actions support and build on each other in an integrated way. It’s a powerful form of working smarter, not harder.
Fourth is MEANING. A theme gives purpose and meaning to every action you take. Your reason for choosing your theme gives you the “why” of your goals and actions. That makes you more likely to continue working toward them and ultimately achieving them.
When I wrote about theme words in two previous years, I was impressed and inspired by the words people shared with me as their own theme words. Opportunity. Strength. Momentum. Inspire. Feedback. Stretch. Courageous. Development. Fancy. Growth. And so many more.
2019 is my ninth year of having an annual theme. The first year, in 2011, was motivated by struggling with feelings of burnout after a particularly intense work project. The work was a success, but my life wasn’t.
So I embarked on a path of thinning out my commitments on my calendar, my clutter in my home and office, and even myself with better nutrition and exercise. That is how THINNING became my theme word.
Last year my theme was BUZZING. That requires a bit of explanation. The full story is in my post about 2018. But the quick story is that standout marketer and entrepreneur Seth Godin writing about about “buzzer management” inspired me.
Seth started the quiz team at his high school. But as he wrote, it “took me 30 years to figure out the secret of getting in ahead of others who also knew the answer (because the right answer is no good if someone else gets the buzz): You need to press the buzzer before you know the answer.”
He went on to say that once you buzz in, the answer will come to you. And even if it doesn’t, the penalty is small. He says “buzzing makes your work better, helps you dig deeper, and inspires you. The act of buzzing leads to leaping, and leaping leads to great work.”
I’m here to tell you that he was right. By picking buzzing as my theme last year, I spoke up and spoke out more often than I had in the past. I said things before I was fully ready. Of course, being a balanced risk taker, I backed up my buzzing with planning and acting and building a foundation in the direction I wanted to go.
And how did things turn out?
I’m happy to say I launched my own business, long a dream of mine, called The Carrelle Company. It grew out of this blog, a side gig I kicked off on New Year’s Day 2015. I’ve been observing and researching and writing about how people build their careers and companies through social media. Now I’m writing, consulting, speaking, and teaching about that as my new career.
One of the newer rituals I added this year was inspired by Danielle LaPorte, a soulful author, speaker, and entrepreneur. Her belief is that by being clear on our feelings, we can design our lives around taking actions that lead to feeling the way we want to feel most of the time.
At first this concept was a bit challenging for me. On the Myers-Briggs personality spectrum, I’m on the “thinking” rather than the “feeling” side, meaning that I prefer logic to emotion. Yet I yearned to feel differently than I did.
So I dipped into Danielle’s workbook to identify what she calls “core desired feelings.” After reflecting on I was grateful for and what wasn’t working, I eventually landed on five words that are my core desired feelings.
One of them is “creative.” Its definition of “originality of thought,” along with “inspired” and “visionary,” really spoke to my soul. Given that writing, blogging, consulting, speaking, and teaching all rest on a fountain of creativity, I was drawn to it as a core feeling.
As I thought about the most important thing for the coming year, it’s being as creative as I possibly can. That led naturally to my theme word for the year: CREATING.
One step at a time, I’m creating my new business. I’m writing a series of books on what successful people do in social media. I’m developing social media plans for clients. I’m preparing for several speaking engagements. And I’m designing a social media class to teach in the spring.
I look forward to sharing much of this creativity with you through my blog and my books.
Every day, I’ll be focused on creating.
How about you? What theme word will inspire and integrate your year?
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?
Recent Comments