How to Leverage Social Media for Career Growth

Social media plays a huge role in today’s offline and online work. Unlocking your career’s potential requires much more than your qualifications and experience. It’s about successfully leveraging social media’s power for career growth.

Social media is prevalent in almost every aspect of our daily lives. However, only a few people have considered using it to boost career growth. That’s more reason to think that way.

You can be successful both online and offline.

By intentionally putting the power of social media into good use, you can easily bring your level of expertise into the spotlight, connect with professionals in different industries, and keep yourself up-to-date on the latest trends and career opportunities.

It’s high time to benefit from social media’s amazing potential in your career and discover how to utilize it maximally for your career growth. So, here are the different ways to leverage social media for Career growth:

How Social Media Can Impact Your Career

Most professionals feel their online presence isn’t important because they’re not interested in digital marketing. Alternatively, there are so many reasons why you should care about how strong your social media presence is.

It’s no longer a new thing that some companies check the social media of their prospective employees to look for a red or green flag, although it’s still debatable whether this is ethical.

Your social media is undoubtedly a bit of who you are, and every single thing, from the content you create and share to who you follow, can say a lot about your personality. You might struggle to accept this, but it might be sad because that is the reality.

If you’re intentional about your online presence, you can create a quality personal brand. This allows you to leverage social media for career growth, and nurturing quality relationships online can help you grow personally and professionally as well.

Social media provided the opportunity to network with people who would have been quite impossible to reach.

How to Leverage Social Media for Career Growth

Now that you know social media can be powerful for career growth, here are some of the best ways to use it as a professional. Maybe you’ve been using it the wrong way.

1. Create Your Social Media Strategy

You must have a motive for doing anything. All social media platforms are different, no matter how much they tend to look similar. You can have different social media platforms for different things, but you should know that some are better for Career growth than others.

2. Sustain Professionalism and Privacy

As an individual looking to grow his/her professional social media platforms, the option of having a personal and professional page is very much advisable. Make good use of your professional accounts to display a different level of your expertise and share relevant career content.

Always have it in mind to control the visibility of your posts. You’re the owner of your social media account, and if you don’t do these things, no one else will.

Be very careful when sharing on social media. Know what should be on your personal account and what information should be on your professional account. This is also one of the ways to leverage social media for career growth.

3. Choose the Right Platforms for You

Change is constant, even on social media, so it’s necessary to keep up with platform updates and find ways to use the available tools to your advantage.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a network for professionals; it’s a large platform for career growth that many people don’t make good use of. It’s not just an app to go to when you are job hunting; it can do much more than that for your career.

On LinkedIn, you can easily share updates concerning your professional life, connect with people around the globe, give and receive career recommendations, and much more. As the saying goes, “Like minds attract.”

You must make sure your LinkedIn profile is carefully optimized with the appropriate keywords. Your profile should be complete with no blank spaces, which will make it more appealing to your profile visitors.

5. Instagram

Instagram can be rated in its own way. It’s an amazing platform for creatives to take advantage of. But when it comes to job searching, it might not do so much for you. That’s why you must set your priorities and know the best platform for you and your chosen career path.

Instagram is more of a visual-oriented platform. Because they deal more with visuals, it will be an interesting social media platform for managers, photographers, videographers, and UX designers. If people in that class can optimize this platform fantastically appealingly, they can successfully leverage this social media platform for career growth.

6. TikTok

TikTok is popularly known for its funny and unserious content, but it can still be a way of growing your career in a non-formal way.

Although the content seen on TikTok might seem irrelevant, it has to be genuine and a hundred percent authentic. With TikTok, you can be professional without being overly serious. Just Know the right way to preach your message conveniently.

The Bottom Line

The power of social media can jokingly be compared to wildfire. No matter how powerful it is, it should rather be used for career growth and not to kill that growing career. There’s a very thin line between these two; be watchful.