How To Make Yourself More Visible Online
The power of social media
I want to use social media in order to be more visible online, how should I start?
Social media channels
Nowadays, there are a lot of social media on the market. When you want to start using them, you have to decide which ones will benefit you and/or your business the most. Usually, this is where your audience is. The different social media focus on different age groups, interests, and provide different communication possibilities (text, visual, video). The most used social media at the moment are: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat.
How to build your online visibility
- Determine your goals
- Choose channels
- Prepare your branding
- Create a content marketing plan
- Test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan
Free-to-use tools
Once you start using the social media channels, you will need to find and create content which you can share. There are a lot of free tools out there which can provide you with great photos, graphic design templates (for newsletters, logo’s etc.) and music (for video’s). Other tools help you to schedule posts and manage all your channels more easily. A list of tools I like to use:
- Management — Buffer
- Photos — Unsplash
- Graphic design — Canva
- Infographics — Piktochart
- Newsletter — Mailchimp
- Survey — Google Forms
- Video — Lumen5
- Music — YouTube Library
My experience
I have been using a lot of social media throughout the last decade. I will share some of my early experiences:
- Facebook
I first got to know social media through the “Dutch Facebook” Hyves. I was not particularly interested in this platform. Only after travelling in Asia and hearing more and more people about Facebook I got interested in social media. I saw it as a way to stay connected with the people I met along the way. This is when I started to see the connecting power of social media. - Twitter
Twitter was interesting for me because I realized all the early adaptors of the national government (where I worked at that time) were there. With them, I, later on, created a community of social media trainers for the government. - Linkedin
LinkedIn I used for connecting with people who were working at interesting companies on interesting projects or who had interesting jobs. Many times I have invited people I had never met before, but who seemed interesting, for a coffee. Their answer was always yes.
For a long time, I did a lot of online marketing without realizing it. For example, in the last three years, I have started several successful Facebook groups for different brands and businesses. Now I realize it is actually a valuable skill to be able to build large online communities. A lot of the skills I learned by doing and trying. Next to this I also read everything there is to read about community building and how to engage people. Instead of using the channels intuitively I started using them more strategically. For sure due to my online visibility, I got several jobs and several clients located all over the world.