Recently a company ask me to to give them an introduction in the usage of social media, by explaining to them how I use it. They found my story helpful so I thought it might be a good ides to share this with you.
I actively started using LinkedIn (my first social media site) in 2004. From the beginning I was aware that your profile would be very valuable if you build it properly, so I decided from the start that I would only use it for professional purposes. I started out very careful only connecting to people I knew really well, later I discovered that there is a value for looser a network as long as it is focused on a certain industry. This weekend I read an old but interesting post on LinkedIn strategies. It divides LinkedIn users in four categories:
- Lions, will connect to anybody
- Turtles, will only connect to people they know really well
- The Hound Dog, wants to connect to everybody they have met in person (following up every meeting with a LinkedIn invitation)
- They Alley Cat, he will sent out only invitations to people for a specific reason, but will accept invitations from everybody.
I went from a Turtle to an Alley Cat. I switched from strategy about a year and a half ago. I had under a 100 connections, this has now grown to 800+.
In the mean time I have added other social media like this blog (WordPress), Facebook and Twitter. I also take part in some special interest communities (e-Learning guild, ASTD, LinkedIn group about learning). At the beginning of this year I started my on LinkedIn group (the e-Learning Piranhas), I read blogs a lot of blogs (thanks to the Ipad and Flipboard).
Quite a lot if you put it all together, but in fact it is even more. At easygenerator we use a blog, twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook too, we even have our own youtube channel. We use the ‘corporate’ social media for formal announcements, I use my ‘personal’ social media to ventilate my opinions about e-Learning. It works like this:
Our corporate website is the center of our activities. It links to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and our blog at WordPress. I use my LinkedIn page as my personal homepage, with plugins all my blogs and tweets are automatically placed there. I write my blog in WordPress and use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to announce new post. Easygenerator retweets my tweets and vise versa. The other thing I use Twitter for is to tweet about other blog posts I have read and when I visit a conference I will tweet about that. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t use it a lot. Only to publish my tweets and blogs and I will accept invitations from people I know. This works fine for me, the hardest part is to keep up with all communities and interest groups I take part in. I’m hoping that it will become possible to follow LinkedIn groups, Ning, Elgg and Yammer communities through Flipboard, that would make my life easier.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
