What are your goals with Social Media?
Before you dive into social media it’s a good idea to identify your goals. Do you want to create a conversation with other designers? Reach new clients for your work? Find out what’s going on out there and get constant input through a myriad of RSS feeds?
All of this is possible, and you will get out of it what you put into it. Keeping on top of your social media presence can be a lot of work, but if you pick your tools appropriately, you can make it work for you.
What’s the most important thing to remember about social media? It’s about “we” not “me”. This video from Mzinga makes it short and sweet.
Ok, with the good advice of the video in mind, start looking for social media sites that are in your interest area. Cruise Twitter and identica to find other bloggers with whom you’d like to have a conversation. Look for community sites that can help you reach the your goals.
For a designer, there are a load of places to get your work seen, but also for you to learn from other designers. Who hasn’t been stuck on a particular technique and gone to the web to find the answer? Likely you found it on a social media site. Tutorials on Vimeo or YouTube, podcasts, forums or blogs, each is a way to find your answers from your peers.
More than a place to find answers, these sites are places where you can establish yourself as an expert, show off your design skills or start a dialogue that can change the way we all work. Innovation comes from experimentation, and just when you think you’re getting stuck in a rut, social sites can be a catalyst for new ideas and ways of doing things.
Sites like Stumbleupon can be a gold mine for ideas, but also to help you promote your own work for potential clients to see. Team up with other designers who work in complementary fields and recommend each other’s work on sites like Stumbleupon and Tumblr.
Blogs can be a vibrant community of designers sharing their thoughts and work. Add your own comments to keep a conversation alive.
Participate.
Establish yourself with your own blog, talk about your work, your goals, your philosophy. This can help develop a presence and establish your place as an expert in your field. When a potential client finds your blog, they get an impression about you and your company and you have an opportunity to begin conversations that can lead to lasting relationships.
Then take your blog an extra step and add TwitterFeed to post the rss feed from your blog to Twitter automatically with Twitterfeed
Once you have a few conversations going, you’ll find you’ve suddenly got a lot to read. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of people I’ve had good conversations with or sites that were linked to and I want to keep in touch with. You can start with Google Reader, which offers a one-stop location for reading all your feeds, or if you have a zillion feeds to read and you just want to scan the titles, check out BlogRovr or Feedly, both good feed readers. It’s really up to which interface you’re most comfortable with.
Remember, the most important thing about social media is the social part. Dive into some discussions,see what people are talking about and expand on it. That’s where the real fun is.
Have some tip’s to share? Leave them in the comments for all to see!
Janet Fouts is a Social Media Coach, helping people in all walks of life make sense of social media. She is also partner at Tatu Digital Media, a web design and development firm in San Jose, Ca.
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