NY Times: How to Use Social Media in Your Career

Posted November 14, 2017

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Everyone knows that social media is an important tool to expand your audience, build your personal brand, and simply just to get your work out there. There are many platforms to choose from, and what works on each one may not be the same as the other. Some are good for showing your full work, others are better for teasing it; some are good for reaching new audiences, others are better at interacting directly with your existing audience.

In an article for The New York Times, Sree Sreenivasan takes you through each of the major platforms and how to best utilize it to advance your career.

It is particularly important in the world of video to take advantage of social media platforms to advance your career. As the web becomes more and more dominated by video there is both more opportunity, and more competition, to showcase your work. 

In his review, Sreenivasan goes through the best platforms for you to advance your career: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. He outlines that each of these platforms behaves differently and has a different culture, and therefore the way you use and interact with each one should be tailored to that. 

LinkedIn, for example, is best for professional networking and expanding your business, but maybe not the best place for you to promote yourself or your work; while Facebook, is a great place to show your full content and expand your viewing audience. 

Here's what we think you should know about social media platforms for video, and if you want to know more you can always check out our social media course. If you are a independent video producer trying to advance your career in video using social media you have to have a hub that everything points to. As you are not using each platform for the same thing, it is best to have a single location, be it a website or social media page (like on Facebook), that is the home for your brand and work. This is a place where all your full videos are, where your fans can interact with you and each other, where you can post updates on your work and highlight other promotional material. This is the central location for everything.

Moving outward from there it is good to then use other platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, to tease and promote your work. Upload shorter teaser versions of your videos to these platforms and direct them to you hub. Additionally, you can use these platforms for more daily updates for your fans including short live videos, photos of where you are shooting, and other things to keep you fans interested and wanting more. 

The thing you will learn about social media platforms and using them to promote yourself, your brand, and your work, is that there is no one right formula for how its done. Social media culture is very much a moving target and what worked last week, may not work so effectively this week. The key is to pay attention to the reaction and feedback you are getting on various platforms and adapt your strategy accordingly. When you find something that works for you, build on that and adapt to the other platforms.

Here's Sreenivasan's overview on why you should be using social media from the article:

Social media is now a critical part of the way people in most walks of life communicate and a key part of how work gets done — from corporations to government. Reflecting how important social media can be, the Department of Homeland Security is collecting social media profiles of potential immigrants as part of its evaluation process. 

Social media allows you to do at least four important things: 

• Discover new ideas and trends.
• Connect with existing and new audiences in deeper ways
• Bring attention and traffic to your work.
• Build, craft and enhance your brand.  

As social media has become more popular — an estimated 81 percent of Americans have a social media account — there are also more instances of people who have gotten in trouble for their social networking habits. The fact is that it’s impossible to separate the personal use of social from the professional, and everything you say online can and will be used against you. There are ways in which you can try to safeguard your privacy and control who sees particular content, but the onus is on you to be vigilant. So, the more seriously you can take your social media activities, the better.

Social media changes all the time, so it’s important to keep up with the evolution of the platforms and to keep looking for ways to optimize your use of the available the tools.(Twitter and Snapchat, for example, recently announced major changes that are described below.)

If you don’t work for yourself, be aware of company policies about the use of social media — more and more corporations are instituting or revising their policies.

Read the full article here.

Check out everything you need to know about social media platforms, creating social media videos, and building your own online network with courses from VJ.