by Caroline Leach | Dec 21, 2017 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
2018 trend stories on social media are everywhere.
How do you take advice for organizational brand building, apply it to your personal brand and boost it through social media?
How do you make sense of the eye-popping list of trends? In my research I came across:
- AI, or artificial intelligence
- AR, or augmented reality
- VR, or virtual reality
- influencer marketing
- Instagram stories
- messaging platforms like WhatsApp
- online hangouts like Houseparty
- more content moderation by platforms
- decline of organic content reach and rise of pay to play
- social listening
- chatbots
- personalization
- Generation Z in the workplace and marketplace
- the rise of ephemeral content with Snapchat and others
- conversational user interfaces, like Alexa
- and video, video, and more video, including professional live video.
That’s a lot to think about. So I researched, sifted and synthesized to identify key personal branding trends. (Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
As you wrap up your year-end social media checklist and turn to the year ahead, here’s how you can tap into the trends for building your career through social media.
Why is this so important?
First, the personal brand you develop through social media and in real life will help you build your network, position yourself for new roles and navigate career transitions.
Start by deciding – or updating – what goals you want to accomplish in your career and how social media can help make them happen.
Maybe a goal is to attract a sponsor to champion your career. “One of the best ways to attract a coveted senior-level sponsor is to develop a strong personal brand,” Dorie Clark says in Harvard Business Review. What better way to do that than through your social media presence?
Second, there’s an element of serendipity in social media. While you can set specific goals for social media actions, you can’t entirely predict or control the outcomes.
How did this work for me? Over the last year, my social media involvement played a part in being invited to speak to mentoring circles and visiting students, being asked to be an influencer at a big company event, and joining the board of governors for an alma mater’s alumni association.
Third, people are spending more time on social media – more than 2 hours a day, and growing. That gives you more opportunities to boost your career through sharing your thoughts, posting your (non-confidential) work and building your network in social media.
Here are the key social media trends you can use to build your career through social media in the year ahead.
1. Platforms are ever evolving.
Social media is an ongoing learning opportunity, because the algorithms and features of each platform are constantly evolving and changing.
That means we individually need to be constantly observing, learning and experimenting in our chosen platforms to see what gets the most engagement.
An easy way to learn outside the platforms is to listen to podcasts during commute time. On the top of my list are The Science of Social Media, Social Pros and Why I Social.
2. Communities are critical.
The mantra to always be connecting will help you build community in your chosen social platforms.
As a start, connect with all of your existing contacts at your company, people related to your work, people in professional associations, and so on.
Add new connections as you meet new people, ideally on a weekly basis. And you can identify people you want to meet and connect with them.
Why is this so important? Dakota Shane writes in Inc.com that you can “win” the social media game by asking,” Is my brand building community on social media?”
Building a strong community of people interested in you and what you have to share will help overcome the ever-evolving algorithms that may limit the reach of your content.
Shane gives great ideas to build community through starting a Facebook group, giving your community members a name, showing your audience love and recognition, and starting a meetup.
3. Influencers are for individuals too.
If influencers continue to build large brands, why not apply the concept to building your career?
This idea first came up for me in an episode of The Science of Social Media. Hosts Brian Peters and Hailley Griffis talked about “pods” of people with complimentary areas of focus in social media. They come together to like, comment on, and share each other’s content.
This trend seems the most pronounced for Instagram. “Insta pods” are groups of 10 to 20 people who follow each other and engagement meaningfully in each other’s content.
You can try this concept on an informal basis by thinking of existing groups you belong to, and if it makes sense to amplify each others’ content.
This happened informally for me with three groups.
- One is mentoring circles I lead with employee resource groups and an alma mater.
- Another is the group of influencers who worked together on a big company event. We naturally stayed in touch afterwards and continue to engage with each others’ content.
- And the marketing and communications team that leads social media for my alumni association involvement is another natural pod.
What groups do you already belong to that could create a pod of people who engage with each other’s social media content?
4. Employee advocacy programs are expanding.
Employee advocacy programs are poised for big growth in the year ahead, according to the 2017 State of Employee Advocacy survey by JEM Consulting.
Adoption grew by more than 25% over the last year. In 2018, the top goal is to increase the number of employees participating as advocates. Why not be one of them?
Through these programs, companies empower their employees to be brand ambassadors, sharing official news and information about the company and its brand through personal social media channels.
This gives you valuable and ready-made content you can curate for your own social media feeds. Not only will you be building your personal brand, you’ll be enhancing your company’s brand, a win-win.
While trust has declined among consumers, peer influence is on the rise. This makes employer advocacy programs particularly important.
I can’t wait to see what my colleagues Nolan Carleton, Claire Mitzner and others at our company have in store to enhance our employee advocacy program in the year to come.
And with the growth of Instagram and Instagram stories, I’m looking forward to exploring that platform in detail in the coming year, much as I did with LinkedIn over the last year.
5. Video keeps increasing in importance.
This is a continuing trend, as video grows in popularity across social platforms. LinkedIn added video capability this year. And video capability continues to evolve across all platforms.
One of my goals over the last year was to experiment with video. I tried Facebook Live and videos posts on Instagram and LinkedIn. This was just dipping my toe into the water, and I didn’t see great variation in engagement between video posts and image posts. At least, not yet. So the coming year is ripe for more experimentation.
6. Pay to play is on the rise.
Algorithms constantly change in social media. Organic unpaid reach in social media is declining for brands. That might help or hurt you as an individual, but it’s hard to know for sure.
One way you can measure is by the engagement trends with your posts. Over the last year, are you getting more likes, comments and shares? If not, you could conduct an experiment by paying to boost or promote a few of your posts. Then you can see what happens and adjust your approach accordingly.
It pays to invest in yourself, so consider allocating a small part of your personal budget to build your career through social media.
What do I pay for personally? Blog hosting services for my WordPress site. A subscription to beautiful visuals through iStock by Getty Images. And an annual LinkedIn premium membership. The accompanying training options alone through LinkedIn Learning make it well worth it.
7. Automation opportunities abound.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to be everywhere in trend articles. The Association of National Advertisers, the ANA, even named AI the marketing word of the year. So I keep wondering how best to apply AI and automation to career building through social media.
Can it create and maintain a social media calendar? Schedule and make posts? Help write top-performing headlines? Conduct research? Outline blog posts?
These are all areas worth exploration in the year ahead. While there are easy ways to weave social media into our everyday lives, I want to learn more about how AI and automation can help.
Given my upcoming focus on Instagram, I’m excited to check out these top 5 Instagram automation tools from Forbes contributor Steve Olenski.
8. Experiments accelerate learning.
My highest performing LinkedIn article was about my experiment in posting to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. Not only did it generate a great deal of valuable data and learning, it engaged my audience much more than other posts, with more than 900 views.
As many of the trend articles attest to, the way to make the most of social media is to take a “test and learn approach.” That’s really the only way to know for sure what will resonate with your community. And what works today might not work a month or a year from now.
There are two near-term experiments on my list. The first is to ask my LinkedIn community what topics they’d like to know more about for career building through social media.
The second is quantitative and qualitative research about why and how professionals are using social media and where they’re finding the most success. Leave me a comment if you’d like to participate.
One trend that likely WON’T work for career building through social media? The rise of ephemeral content in Snapchat and Instagram. This short-term and disappearing content doesn’t build an enduring digital footprint of your work and your point of view.
By creating and curating content in social media on a regular basis, you’re building your career, one post and one interaction at a time. Here are some ways to make it part of your everyday life.
What trends are you focusing on for the coming year?
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 | Jun 18, 2017 | Social Media
How do you prepare when you have an upcoming business meeting with someone you’ll be meeting for the first time?
Sure, you’ll set objectives for the meeting. You’ll create an agenda. And you’ll think about the information you want to share. These are all best practices for effective meetings.
But don’t stop there.
Social media gives you valuable opportunities to learn more in advance about the person, or people, you’ll be meeting. It opens a new window on what’s important to someone and how they think.
It’s all part of making a great first impression, as Rebecca Knight covers well in a Harvard Business Review article. It’s packed with tips from thought leaders Whitney Johnson and Dorie Clark.
With social media, you can take 15 to 30 minutes to get to know someone’s career, their professional interests and their potential commonalities with you.
Here are 6 ways to do that, as part of your social media savvy strategy.
Visit their LinkedIn profile. Focus on their current role and the problems that person is solving in their work. Consider how that connects with your meeting objectives.
See what other jobs they’ve held, what groups they’re part of and where they went to school. Read recommendations to get a better sense of who they are. See if you have any connections in common.
Look at their other social media activity. Are they active on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook? Visit those sites to round out your view of what’s important to this person.
Read their blog. If they have a blog, read the most recent 3 posts. Scan previous posts for topics that might be relevant to your upcoming meeting.
If they don’t have their own blog, see if they’ve posted articles in LinkedIn that would give you similar insight.
Search Google. No research is complete without a Google search. You can search on the person’s name, as well as the person’s name along with their current employer or other keywords related to your meeting topic.
See what pops up on the first 3 screens of your search. Visit a few of the links to learn more.
Send a personalized LinkedIn connection request. Once you have a sense of what you might have in common, or what’s especially interesting to you about this person, send a LinkedIn connection request.
In your personalized request (always personalize!), you can mention your upcoming meeting and that you’d like to connect in advance. This helps better establish the relationship, and it may prompt the person to view your profile and learn more about you.
Make sure you’ve put your best foot forward in your profile. Any recent content you’ve posted should further – or at least not detract from – your meeting agenda and objectives.
Comment on their content. In your research, what content stood out to you as especially salient to your upcoming meeting? You can like and comment on a recent piece of content that is aligned with your meeting topic. And if it would be valuable to your own network, consider sharing it more broadly.
These actions will enable you to know your audience much better and help foster a positive working relationship from the very beginning. (A reminder that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Just remember to keep it light in both your virtual and real-life interactions. Don’t like or comment on too much content and don’t bring up subjects that your new business acquaintance might consider too personal or intrusive.
What are ways you connect with people in social media before an initial meeting?
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.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 2, 2017 | Social Media
It’s a new year. A fresh start. How will you revitalize your social media strategy?
You can start by thinking about how social media will change in the coming year.
No one knows for sure what will happen, but here are some interesting trends from personal branding expert William Arruda.
And at a macro level, Bryan Kramer has a roundup of 2017 predictions in social media and content marketing. This includes one of the best in personal branding, Dorie Clark.
As a communications and marketing professional in the corporate world, I think the following changes will have the biggest impact in the year ahead.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions are my own).
Life is lived on stage. Every day when you leave your house, you’re in the public eye. You could be photographed, recorded, tagged, tweeted and snapped, all without your express permission or even your knowledge.
The upside to all this? It’s one more incentive to live a high-integrity life. To do the right thing. To make the world a better place.
In the words from the film Ocean’s Eleven, “there’s always someone watching.” Make sure you’re presenting yourself as who you authentically are and how you want to be seen.
It’s not even clear how long our own homes will be a sanctuary from the public sphere. On Thanksgiving day in my leafy town, I spotted a drone in a nearby yard. It made me rethink my window coverings.
It also made me think about feedback. I used to work with a chief marketing officer who was a fantastic speaker. He owned the stage. And he always wanted to improve. After a big speech, he’d ask me for the video so he could critique his performance.
That’s a wise move for every professional. Take some time each month to evaluate how you’re coming across in video, in pictures and in words.
When I’m giving a big speech, I record my practice sessions on my phone. That has two benefits.
The first is a way to improve my actual delivery by assessing how I look and sound.
The second is a way to memorize the speech in advance, so I can deliver it in a more natural way.
How? By listening to the recording while I’m driving and when I’m about to go to sleep (a proven method for studying and remembering information).
Images trump words. As a word lover, it pains me to write that images are more powerful than words. But it’s true. Even my iPhone keypad is suggesting emojis in place of certain words.
Every social post needs an image. Research shows that articles with images get 94% more views.
Wherever I go, I take pictures on my iPhone. I may not use them right away, but I’m building a library of images for the future.
On New Year’s Day, for example, I wanted to share a personal picture.
The year before, my family attended the Tournament of Roses Parade (with reservations about the early hour and the relatively cold weather, by Southern California standards).
The perception of frostbite aside, my camera roll was filled with pictures of beautiful, colorful floats. A photo of South Dakota’s float of Mount Rushmore caught my eye. Four great presidents. In a month when our country will inaugurate a new leader. There was my timely and timeless image.
In addition to using my own photos, I subscribe to a few image sites, iStock and Canva. They’re well worth the investment, because they make content more eye-catching and professional.
Video trumps stills. For as much as photos are better than words, they’re starting to seem almost as dated as mere words. It’s the moving image that captures the eye. From Facebook Live to Periscope to over-the-top video, the moving image reigns supreme.
This will be an area of experimentation for me in 2017. I’ll start with a few short videos in my Instagram feed. I’ll try Facebook Live. And maybe I’ll turn some of my blog posts into videos. That idea that jumped out at me in Gary Vaynerchuk‘s Udemy course on building a personal brand.
Snap isn’t just for teens. Now that Snapchat is just simply Snap, it’s unavoidable in the news and the cultural zeitgeist. It’s how my teenage daughter and I enjoy spending time together, checking out her snap streaks and laughing over the funny moments she and her friends capture of every day life.
I’m still figuring out the basics, like how to take a decent picture that won’t be obscured in all the wrong places by the filter du jour. It feels like having all thumbs, like I did when I first joined Twitter and I hadn’t fully figured out why I was there yet. More to come on this topic as this learning project takes shape.
Professionals need a plan. With so many ways to share your professional expertise, ideas and achievements, a plan is essential.
It starts with setting goals. What do you want to accomplish? What social media networks should you be on? What are good ways to curate and create content?
From there, you need a calendar. I’ve been searching for a ready-made one, unsuccessfully so far. Right now I’m using an Excel spreadsheet. As this evolves into something better, I’ll share updates in future posts.
Right now, it’s organized by date, broken into weeks and months. For content ideas, I look at upcoming:
- Blog posts on social savvy for professionals
- Work news and events
- Conferences and training sessions
- Speaking engagements
- Hashtag holidays
- Personal milestones
For each piece of content, the calendar includes:
- Posting date and time
- Content headline
- Content summary
- Content type (e.g., blog post, photo or video with caption, etc.)
- Category (professional, personal or a mix)
- Creative (photo or video)
- Channel (which social network or networks)
- Hashtags (especially for Instagram and Twitter)
- Status (whether in development, posted or in the comments stage).
What changes are you making in your social media strategy this year?
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