Develop a Strategy for Social Media

If you only think that social media is a playground for personal folly, think twice as the majority of employers use social media to evaluate potential and current employees. In addition, social media has become the premier method for professionals to promote themselves and enhance their career. This all necessitates having a professional persona using social media that you control. 

A persona is what you project about yourself. This is the person you want others to think you are.

Can you have more than one persona? Yes, we act this way all of the time. If you behave differently when you are with your relatives than with your friends than you are representing a different persona. People will judge you based on how you portray yourself.

Getting and maintaining a job requires the development of a professional persona that will represent the qualities employers are looking for.  It is not just about your skills and abilities, it is also about how well you ‘fit’ into the culture. Do you share the values of the organization?

Developing a persona that represents you professionally will help others to understand your values, ethics, and interests when looking for a job or advancing your career opportunities. The use of social media is the best environment for developing and maintaining this persona.  Will your persona change over time? Probably, that is why your persona should never be considered static. As with your life itself, it is something that needs to be maintained and not left to wallow.

Establishing a Persona Strategy is a way of recognizing and establishing what you want others to see you as. You can have different persona's, such as the one you may have for your family, another for your friends, and another for you work.  At the heart of it all is still you, who you are, but there will normally be a different perspective that each group needs to know and identify with.

Think about it as if looking in a mirror. Are you the same person you were five years ago? Probably not. What is different? Do you like it? What do you need to accept or change? This is how others see you.

This all comes with living socially.

The use of social media has increased the opportunity for individuals to share and engage with larger numbers of people. A way to build your communities. It also becomes a tool for self promotion and development. .

Social media is based on trust. If you want to build your network you have to be trusted. This provides a greater need to have a Professional Persona Strategy.  A strategy is a plan to obtain what you want to achieve. A Professional Persona Strategy is a plan to ensure that others will find what you want them to find as well as how you want to portray yourself.

Here are factors that should be considered in developing a Professional Persona with social media:

Your Name - consider if you want to use your full name, family name or use a professional title.

Handle - a single user name that represents your persona

Bio - what do want to say to others about who you are, what you can do, where you want to go.

Age, Gender, where you live, contact information, education - this is information that is publicly available, what and where do you want to share this needs to be identified

Picture - a picture is worth a thousand words. What do you want your profile picture to represent? what pictures do you want to display? what pictures do you NOT want to appear?

Interests & Activities - select the interests to share: sports, hobbies, political, educational, etc. How much and often do you want to share?

Social media goals - determine why you are using social media, what purpose will it serve, how often you will use it.

Social media use - determine what tools are to be used, how they are to be each used, and how frequently you will use them.

Social media success criteria - how will progress be measured and evaluated? what are you looking for as outcomes from using social media?

Isn’t it time that you started to take social media seriously? Isn’t it time for you to think about how you are using social media professionally? Before you do anything else, sit down and craft a strategy before you start building profiles, sharing, and engaging.

Handles: Creating a name for yourself

You all have a 'given' name, but what do your friends or family call you?

If your name is Robert, people at work may call you Rob, your friends may call you Bob, and your family may call you Robbie.

These are all names or 'handles' that others use to identify you based on the persona that you represent with them. It is something that is easy to say or use and clearly is recognizable as you.

What about on the web or social media? Who are you? How do people find you, specifically? What is your handle?

A username is used to identify a unique person in a network or within a software system.  This is the primary security method companies implement to identify users within their systems and networks. Typically, companies assign usernames. With the public use of the internet and the web, individuals have been required to create their own usernames for the different web services, such as email accounts that they have setup.

The difficulty is that a person may end up with many different user names. This can create confusion for not only the user, but also for those attempting to connect with that individual. The advent and growth of social media has made this an even more daunting task as there are many different social media tools to be used.

Ideally, there would be one identifier that could allow an individual to move between all systems and networks. This is where our digital life is all headed, a unique identifier represented by avatar software that carries the identity. However, this will take awhile as the technology and social recognition of a complete digital persona becomes accepted.

Today a person could create a domain name for which to own an IP address associated with themselves. This can be used to create a website or blogsite where others can view information about an individual. What this does not do, is to identify a person within the social networks such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram.

All of the social media accounts allow a person to be identified by a unique, alphanumeric identifier, or simply a 'handle'. This 'handle', as Twitter refers to this identifier, allows individuals to create a nickname by which it is easier and quicker to identify someone uniquely within a social network. It allows an individual to create something unique by which to be found within a social network. The key is to establish one 'handle' that can be used on multiple social networks.

Social networks require the association of an email account with access to their social network. Setting up a 'handle' begins by creating a username within a web email account, such as Gmail. The username then becomes not only the name by which people can send you email, but also how they can find you in a social network. As an example, if you want to send me an email or find me in a social network, you can simply use 'dominele'.

The quandary that many people have is finding the 'handle' that will work on different social networks. The first item is to consider how you want to be identified. Is it related to just your name or is there another element of your life for which you want to build upon, such as your profession. The second item to consider is wether this 'handle' is available on the social networks. Doing both takes some time. Recommend coming up with several different 'handles' that could be used and investigating their availability at namechk.com.

Establishing an effective professional persona in social media requires that an individual be able to control how they are discovered. For now, this begins with an individual creating a name for themselves as a 'handle' that can be used in multiple social networks and as an email address.