This two-hour social media workshop will guide participants through LinkedIn demographics, and best practices for developing and managing their professional account. Specifically, participants will learn how to accept and send connection requests, post images and articles, interact with other users. Finally, key components of a LinkedIn professional profile will be discussed.
Register: http://smallbizcentre.ca/events/linkedin-best-practices-workshop-2/
This two-hour social media workshop will guide participants through LinkedIn demographics, and best practices for developing and managing their professional account. Specifically, participants will learn how to accept and send connection requests, post images and articles, interact with other users. Finally, key components of a LinkedIn professional profile will be discussed
Register: http://smallbizcentre.ca/events/linkedin-best-practices-workshop/
Guest Blogger: Derek Ochej
Despite the many similarities of different social media platforms, each one has its own positives and negatives. In no particular order below are what I personally find to be one positive and one negative aspect of each of the ‘big’ social media accounts. Agree? Disagree? Let your feelings be known in the comments.
Positive: The one platform that everyone seems to be on. Things certainly have changed since being a student was a requirement for getting the Facebook. You don’t even need to be human: for example, in university I created a Facebook account for the store mannequin we had in our living room. Having such a large audience makes it easy to keep up with many different people and groups.
Negative: The awful algorithms that are the reason why 90 per cent of my Timeline is full of things that friends, or friends of friends, have liked. I don’t have a voyeuristic instinct to see baby pictures and humblebrags from people I don’t know.
Positive: The best source for breaking, but not always accurate, news. Twitter is the first place I go once I hear rumours of something big in the world, whether it is a possible coup in Turkey, or the end of Brangenlina.
Negative: After having tackled this issue a few years ago, the spam accounts and bots are back with a vengeance. The amount of tweets that I have made or been tagged in that have been liked by pornographic accounts attempting to drive me to a website makes me reluctant to check Twitter at work.
Positive: The best platform for photos and videos, and probably one of the simpler social media platforms, although I can see it starting to get more and more complicated.
Negative: Almost as bad a problem with spam as Twitter (hence why I have a locked account) and how difficult it is to search for relevant accounts. The search function is made worse by the preponderance of fake/’parody’ accounts.
Positive: A solid source of professional information and relevant news, particularly once you have built up a network of contacts in your field or that post interesting content.
Negative: Suffers from trying to being way too many things and having too many features. Also seems to be losing the professional etiquette that separated it from the other social media accounts on this list.
Snapchat
Positive: The story function is really quite neat, and it seems to be gaining a lot of traction due to its popularity with younger generations. The fact that POTUS has an account and uses it to share behind-the-scenes content is pretty neat.
Negative: It makes me feel old since I don’t really have a big contact network on it, and the fact that I don’t really understand all of its functions.
What are your personal opinions on some of the popular social media platforms? Love ’em? Hate ’em?
One of the most common statements I hear about LinkedIn is, “I have a profile, but I have no idea what I am doing.” Further to that point, most people reveal they only have a profile because a colleague invited them. That said, many people continue to have partially completed, boring profiles.
If you want to standout from the crowd on LinkedIn, read on:
1. Profile Photo
While I am not the first person to mention the importance of a profile photo on LinkedIn, I would like to emphasize the importance of a professional and recent photo. If you have cropped your photo out of a group photo, it’s time for a new photo. If the photo is more than 5 years old, it’s time to book an appointment with a professional photographer.
Once you have the new photo, upload it to LinkedIn and make sure that your photo is visible to everyone. This will ensure that people who are not connected to you can see your photo.
2. Media
LinkedIn is known for resembling a resume and being primarily text-based. Recently, LinkedIn announced a new feature, Work Samples, which allows users to include various types of media on their profile, including photos, videos, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations.
Work Samples are a great opportunity for people to include… well… samples of their work. This can include photos of physical products, product videos, videos of interviews with the media, links to blogs, sales presentations, or photos of you/your business in action.
I’ve chosen to upload photos of myself speaking at events, or with group photos of workshop participants.
To add media samples to the Summary, Education, and Experience sections on your profile:
3. Background Photo
The background photo appears in the top section of your LinkedIn profile, behind your contact card. Adding a background photos adds additional visual stimulus to your profile.
To remain consistent with my company’s branding, I have chosen a single colour. Users, however, can upload photos, or custom-made graphics.
To add a background photo
Note: The background image must be JPG, GIF, or PNG, and must not be larger than 4MB, and between 1000×425 and 4000×4000 pixels.
Hopefully these tips will make your LinkedIn profile standout from the crowd.
Good luck!
During the Christmas holidays I found many conversations lent themselves to discussing social media, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter; further, what I noticed about these conversations was they consistently had a negative undertone.
Bemoaned comments like:
“Geeze! Jane* posts 20 times a day! Does she have nothing better to do?”
“Goodness! I get 30 notifications a day. I can’t keep up.”
“Ugh! Sandy wants to connect with me, but I don’t even know who she is!”
If social media causes so much stress, why do we maintain Facebook profiles, tweet on Twitter, and connect on LinkedIn?
That’s easy. To be connected. To stay in touch. To view photos. To be informed. To stay hip.**
But with the desire to remain connected, we’ve managed to stress ourselves out. Too many posts to read. Too many emails. Too many retweets. Too many notifications. Too many tweets. Too many invitations to connect. Too. Much.
With the mindset of providing practical tools to help simplify social media, I have compiled a list of my personal “Top 5 Ways to Simplify Social Media.”
If I had a dollar for every time someone complained about Facebook to me, I would be a very rich woman. As you know, Facebook is a massive social media platform with many intricate tools. Because there are so many moving parts, users can quickly become overwhelmed.
Facebook has changed the definition of friendship. Webster’s Dictionary defines friend as… a person who you like and enjoy being with, as well as a person who helps or supports someone or something.
If you see a “Facebook friend” in the grocery store would you a) stop for a conversation, b) politely nod, or c) pretend you don’t see him/her and hide behind the cereal display. If you answered b or c, I would suggest “unfriending” that individual.
Firstly, it is OKAY to “unfriend” someone on Facebook, more so if that person causes you undue stress through excessive posting, sharing, or game requests.
Secondly, that person DOES NOT receive a notification that you have unfriended them.
To unfriend someone, visit their profile, and click “unfriend” – that’s it. I recommend going through your entire friend list and unfriend anyone who is causing you stress and cluttering your life.
If unfriending is a bit harsh for you, then I would suggest “unfollowing” that person, which means you remain friends but stop receiving updates in their newsfeed.
Newsfeed is the first screen you see when you log into Facebook. It is a customized feed of posts from your friends, Pages you follow, and advertisements. Recently, however, Newsfeed has been cluttered with friend’s actions (e.g. Derek ‘Liked’ this; Wil commented on this) rather than actual posts from friends or Pages. “This” content is not necessarily related to the user because it is comprised of actions from your friend’s friends. (Follow that?) Meaning: You may be seeing a lot of content that has nothing to do with you or your direct friends.
To reduce clutter you can hide posts from your friend’s friends. Hover on the post, and click the small grey arrow in the top right corner. Click “Hide.” You will no longer receive posts in your Newsfeed from people you don’t know. You will have to do this action a lot at the beginning, but will eventually settle.
Personally, Twitter is my favourite social media platform. I love the ease of use, and simple design. That said, many people become overwhelmed by Twitter due to the amount and speed of content, use of the pound symbol, and curious looking links.
A retweet is a tweet that you forward to your followers. A participant in a workshop equated it to “an email forward.” The one-click RT is both a blessing and curse, it is easy to share information, but some people abuse this by RTing too much content. If you enjoy following someone because of their original tweets, but dislike all their RTs, you can turn-off their RTs.
To turn off retweets from a specific user, visit their profile, click the cog, and then click “Turn off Retweets.” You will continue to receive all native tweets, but no second party tweets from that specific user.
Within Twitter users have the ability to create lists of users, which can be public (visible to anyone) or private (visible only to you). You can add any user to one or more lists, and DO NOT have to follow that user. Meaning: You can create a list on a certain topic (e.g. news, athletes, clients) and do not have to have these users clutter your main Newsfeed. Think of it as “Twitter on Demand” for specific and customized topics.
To add someone to a list, visit their profile, click the cog, and click “Add to List.” If you currently do not have a list, click “Create New List”. Check the box, then start adding people to your list!
Lists are a great way to stay informed about specific topics on-demand, rather than these topics cluttering your newsfeed.
As the senior-citizen of social media platforms (It launched 1 year before Facebook), LinkedIn is working to redefine itself as a social media site for professionals, and students. Its membership growth is currently 2 new members per SECOND! Speaking of which…
Have you ever received an “Invitation to Connect” from someone you didn’t know? I am going to assume, YES. Invitations from strangers are a common concern among LinkedIn users. Your next step, however, is up to your personal preference.
Firstly, I only recommend connecting with people you know. This is for your personal privacy, as well as to maintain the legitimacy of your ‘professional network.’ It is better to have a solid network of 150 people, than 1500 who stress you out, and continually SPAM you with inMail. In addition, more often that you think, people will say to me: “Hey, I saw on LinkedIn you know John Smith too! How do you know him?” What would you say if you didn’t know the person?
If you choose not to connect with someone you can choose one of two actions: a) click ignore request, or b) do nothing. By choosing ‘b’ you leave the opportunity open in the event you eventually meet this person – making it easier to connect. This is the option that I choose, as I never know when I will meet someone IRL (in real life).
While there are many other tips to simplify social media, I hope you enjoyed hearing my “Top 5 Ways to Simplify Social Media.”
Do you have your own suggestions? Share below!
*Names have been changed.
**I can’t take credit for this comment, as it was made in a workshop I hosted in 2013.
