Engaging social media

Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have become an important part of people’s lives. The profiles on these sites are like your front garden, they say something about you. LinkedIn is like the office and having a professional looking profile sends out a message to others about your professionalism. Your Facebook Timeline also says a lot about you. You should be careful what you post there.

More and more employers now are looking at LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to check out prospective employees. LinkedIn has a job section too and many of the jobs now involve social media. Companies have pages on LinkedIn and often Facebook pages. Social media is an important part of marketing. When you have a Facebook page, you should see that as marketing yourself. You are projecting an image through your Facebook page. It could be an image that your friends like, but would a prospective employer?

Something that is inadvisable to post on social media is profanity or anything likely to offend. It’s advisable to steer clear of politics and religion too. I do make political comment, but I try to be fair and reasonably objective.

My Facebook page has photographs and video and I try to make comments  fairly positive. I also have a variety of friends from many different countries and so I’m careful not to make comment that might be considered racist.

On my LinkedIn profile there is  a lot about me. My  profile that is meant to tell you who I am. It is designed to cast me in a good light obviously. It has recommendations from people who know me and they’re fairly consistent in what they say about me. It can be a mistake to make your profile too full of self praise. You can come across as narcissistic if you describe yourself using all the trending clichés.    

I also try to use Twitter, but don’t post an account of everything that I do. Links to my blogs are automatically posted and I try to keep up with Tweets from people that I’m following. I think I could use Twitter more effectively, I mainly keep up on news and odd things that interest me. I use Tweetdeck for Chrome and that is an easy way for me to keep in touch with trends and news.

There are other less popular social media sites like Myspace that has become popular for people in performing arts. I just tried to log into Myspace, I have 6 email addresses and I can’t remember which one I used, let alone the password. I also got a server error; no wonder it’s not as popular as it used to be.

Deviant Art asked for my user name and then I had a few goes at my password and logged in. It’s not a site that I use very often, but it does have great art.

My Modern Metropolis is another site dedicated to art that I use sometimes. You can have a page on there and share your art and creativity with like-minded people.

Even the dating sites are kind of social networking and there are lots of those. Meet me used to be very popular, but it seems to be more like a dating site now. Meet up is a website where you can join groups that as the name suggests, meet up.  I just took a look and found a local arts and culture group.

Social media is about connecting to other people, you can do that in many ways on the internet. MSN was a direct way, but that’s closing down in many countries, but you can still chat using Skype and exchange files. Chat can be text, voice or webcam. I prefer text, maybe because I can type. I dislike webcam chat, it’s like inviting someone into your home at short notice.

Do you make the most of social media? Please share your thoughts in the comments box.

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