How professional is your social media style? Today, a strategic, branded personal presence on social media platforms can be a valuable career asset. The way you present yourself online can demonstrate your expertise, attract prestigious clients, and deepen your relationships with your colleagues. But just because you have a LinkedIn or Facebook page doesn’t mean you are enhancing your business reputation. It takes a bit of planning and strategy to transform presence into a career asset. I’ve got some tips to help you polish your online presence to a career-enhancing gleam.

From Community Builder to Career-Enhancing Asset

If you are anything like me, you didn’t give a thought to social media style, let alone personal branding, when you joined Facebook. It just seemed like a cool online community, yes? So, you pulled together a profile and started posting photos and reporting observations to your social circle of family and friends. The rest of the world joined in. LinkedIn appeared on the scene. Then Instagram and YouTube and Pinterest and Twitter and at some point, the cool online community graduated to a serious business tool that prompted a sea change in business marketing. That Facebook profile was a step into a brave new promotional world.

You Can Leverage Your Social Media Style at Any Age

I took undergraduate degrees in philosophy and design into law school, and began practicing law in the mid ‘80s. There were no computers or smartphones. I was dictating letters for my secretary to type, and still remember when the first fax machine rolled into our office. It seemed positively magical to slide a letter into that machine and know it was coming out, in real time, on the other side of the world.

Then computers appeared on the scene. My law firm stepped reluctantly into the world of marketing, and I was assigned the roll of liaison between my lawyers and the design firm who created our brand. Dazzled by my exposure to advertising, I left law, founded my own business representing commercial creatives, and bought a computer. I still remember a guy I was dating at the time telling me about something called the Internet, He predicted that one day, I’d be able to order the specialty olive oil I loved directly from the Italian company that made it. I thought he was crazy.

I built a national network of advertising contacts, branded my company, and spent many hours and even more dollars producing and sending quarterly mailings to my 10,000 advertising contacts and placing expensive annual ads in industry resource catalogs. I was an unsupported on-my-own start-up easily spending $50,000.00+ annually to connect with buyers who, today, would be a free click away. It was a heavy, expensive lift. But my extensive network, thoughtful branding, committed hard work paid off. My company was headquartered in a third-tier advertising market, but my branding and promotional campaigns won me national recognition and respect. I worked long hours, partnered with incredible artists, and served national and international clients—before Facebook was even a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Turning Adversity into an Asset-Building Opportunity

My creative representation business was flourishing in September of 2001. I was confirming my appointments for a Minneapolis portfolio showing trip when two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. That terrible tragedy and the industry shifts it set in motion spelled the end of my repping business. It was a dark time with a silver lining. With my business languishing and my world crumbling around me, I made a bold decision. I had always loved the Twin Cities, and I decided to relocate to Minnesota and start again. For the first time in my life—I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had no job and just a handful of acquaintances in the Cities, but that didn’t stop me. 

I was open to possibilities. Along the way I hopped into the novelty of Facebook. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, all of my past experience harnessing written aptitude with visual sensibility and respect for the power of branding served my “next chapter” well. I was a marketer by instinct, a storyteller by nature, and a visual brander by training. Facebook played to those strengths, and I exercised them without consciously realizing what I was doing.

Smart Branding is the Key to Successful Social Media Style

Only in retrospect do I recognize that I was branding myself on social media from the start. Branding my communication was instinctual to me then; now, it has become a very deliberate art that anyone can master—even without a background in advertising.

Your “brand” is your message to the world about who you are, what you do, and why what you do matters to others. And here’s the secret I share with my friends: the social media platform does not make the brand. YOU make your brand by strategically selecting the visual colors and images you use, the content you post, and the voice you write with when you present your content. If you’ve got a strong, authentic brand, any social media platform can work for you. But without a defined brand, your social media presence squanders its potential, and can even work against you.

Use Social Media to Nurture Your Professional Community

You create your brand before you step into social platforms. Honing your social media style can’t create connections (at least, not at first), but it’s a wonderful tool for nurturing existing connections into relationships. The foundation for my current network didn’t originate online. It was built in face-to-face meetings. I’ve always been social. When I relocated to Minnesota, I made it my priority to meet people, attend events, volunteer, and host intimate dinner parties to introduce friends to each other. My initial contacts with new people were personal and face-to-face.

But one contact does not a relationship make, and one-on-one meeting are time consuming. In the past, I’d used mailings to maintain a connection to my 10,000 strong audience. Now, I was using social media to stay in touch and cultivate warmer relationships. And it wasn’t costing me a dime.

As I made connections in my new home, I friended them all on Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn was perceived as the “professional” platform, but with my advertising background, I preferred the more visual format of Facebook. I used Facebook to deepen new contacts into relationships, and keep my people apprised of my adventures, both personal and professional.

The value of these free online platforms was not lost on me. I remembered the cost of my quarterly mailings to 10,000 contacts, so I made the most of free online platforms to keep my new contacts “in the know” with regular posts that sounded personal to each of the hundreds of people I was reaching. Advertising taught me the power of imagery to enhance a message—Facebook made it easy to add beautiful visuals to my posts. Without conscious intention, I was branding my posts with elegant images and my unique voice, and focusing on the audience I wanted to reach.

Build Friends and Followers Before You Need Favors

I have always believed in cultivating relationships and providing value before I ask anyone to do a favor for me. It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people make: they ignore their professional network—and their social media style—until they lose their job or want to make a career pivot. Suddenly, they need help, but they haven’t cultivated a network of people to help them. If you don’t build your network until you need a network, you will be behind before you begin.

I traveled back and forth between my home and the Twin Cities for a year before I relocated. My big picture goal was a new career, but my first priority was not finding work: it was building a network. I sought introductions, arranged countless coffee meetings, and begin cultivating new relationships. I vividly remember one gracious woman who agreed to meet me to chat over lunch. She had orchestrated a stunning career pivot from Target VP to best-selling marketing author and speaker.

“This is your time to explore the areas that interest you,” she told me. “Your next career might not be obvious to you yet, and that’s OK. Sometimes, when you are following your passions, the career finds you.” She was right. I had no thought of pursuing a writing career—but writing found me in the Cities. One of my new friends liked my writing style and offered me a writing project. I took it and she was delighted with my work. More writing assignments followed. Because I was already connected to a new network of friends and colleagues on social media, all I had to do was post about these writing assignments I’d been given. And that’s when things got interesting.

Strong Relationships Create Referrals

The people I’d met and then cultivated on social media started contacting me—with introductions and more writing projects. I continued to be out and about cultivating new contacts to add to my network, but between my social activity, my disciplined addition of new contacts to Facebook and LinkedIn, and my regular social media posts, I had created a powerhouse referral generator that blossomed into a six-figure writing career. Fifteen years later, I have an established expertise in medical writing and social media strategy for healthcare organizations, and more offers of work than I can accept. My clients include specialty practices, international healthcare device companies, and national vaccination organizations. All of these clients were generated through the personal connections I made and then cultivated with my social media style strategies.

Are You Ready to Spin Your Social Media Style into Career Gold?

If the idea of branding your social media style sounds intriguing—but a bit intimidating, I’ve got you. I created a step-by-step guide that shows you how to develop your own personal brand, evaluate the best social media platforms for your objectives, and create a memorable customized bio for each platform you use, with tips for growth, engagement, and professional social media etiquette along the way.

With a bit of experienced guidance, anyone can upgrade their social media style to enhance an existing career, educate an audience about mission, or successfully pivot into a new professional direction. Social media tools are yours for the taking, and I encourage everyone to turn these free tools into valuable career-boosting assets.

My guide is free to you—because when I say I am committed to women supporting women, I mean it!

Download your free copy here: Spin Your Social Media Presence into Professional Gold.

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