Social media has not only become a necessity in everyone’s personal life, but also essential to the success of anyone’s professional career.
In today’s digital age, all sources of information about an employee and examples of their work must be able to be found on the Internet.
Social Media Manager Adam Constantine often advocates how extremely important having a professional presence on social media is for the younger generation.
“I think the trend right now is that technology brings convenience,” Constantine said. “Anything you can do to aid in the convenience of someone else seeing your work is important.”
Since 2013, 93 percent of marketers use social media for business ventures, declaring social media an extremely common form of advertisement and making it a large part of company’s marketing strategy.
Therefore, it has become extremely important for potential employees and college students today to start using professional social media accounts.
“When you’re starting your own social media accounts for a business, you want to know who your brand is, you want to be able to express what you are going to stand for,” Constantine said.
He expressed how social media is a “very noisy place,” allowing participants to get involved with excess information that does not contribute to their brand.
One of the most important aspects of creating a brand is finding the target audience the brand is most likely to appeal to.
After finding an audience, the next step to having a successful online presence is bringing the brand to multiple social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and even Snapchat.
Once a target audience has been established, the professional brand needs to start gaining a fanbase — which is difficult but can be done a few different ways, according to Constantine.
One of the ways to create a fanbase is by carefully choosing the social media platform which affects what type of information produced, as well as the fanbase the content creater trying to achieve.
Another helpful hint to creating a fanbase is by buying ad space on the particular medium you choose to create your professional account on.
But the most important factor is as simple as creating the information being made public to the audience.
“The biggest thing is having consistent content that your audience is going to enjoy and allowing them to decided to follow you because then it is of a more genuine interaction,” Constantine said.
Though social media has brought companies large success and has allowed college students the opportunity to show employers work that they have produced, social media can also have a negative effect on personal brands.
Many times companies and people get into trouble by publishing information that is perceived differently than intended by the author.
“Perception is reality,” Constantine said. “There are going to be times when there are unintended consequences of things you have said that can negatively affect you.”
In the unique platform of social media, the audience has the control of whether creaters are successful.
“An audience makes you successful on social media by the engagement that they receive, it is very much based on your audience interactions with your brand,” Constantine said.