Grow Your Network through Social Media

Like most things in life, social media has its pros and cons. Maybe you find yourself getting lost in a sea of topics and discussions, using social media to procrastinate. This is a bad use of the tool. It is possible to use social media to expand your network, connect with people, and engage in meaningful conversations. This chapter will show how social media can be an asset in your career.

In this chapter, we will cover the basics of social media for technical career development, personal versus professional social media usage, and how to build your online presence, reach out to people, and have meaningful conversations.

You will learn how to use social media to advance your career, how to create a professional profile, how to adjust your social media experience for professional benefit, how to meet people and get involved in the online community, and finally, how to initiate and participate in career-advancing conversations.

The following...

Learning how to use social media to develop your technical career

Since the early days of the internet, there has been some form of social interaction and dialog. Social media can be said to be a collection of interactive technologies or media that aid in the creation of information, ideas, and dialog, and that facilitates the sharing and distribution of them based on different interests. They can be shared electronically in social communities or as part of social networks. There is a wide variety of social media services currently available, but new ones are added on an ongoing basis, and there are those that fall out of favor over time. While in the early days of social media, interactions were text-based, in the days of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, social media can be said to comprise text-based content and/or a combination of multimedia content, such as photographs, videos, or memes. This content is generated by a user and intended to be interactive on web-based applications or mobile...

Personal versus professional social media usage

You may have many interests and hobbies. Most people do. Consider maintaining separate accounts for personal and professional interests, especially if you have interests that are distinct from your technical professional career, such as politics.

While it is important to show a well-rounded perspective of yourself and some insight into your personality, your professional social media accounts should focus primarily on your professional interests. Since most employers will check your social media account, and they are often listed on your professional profiles, you should aim to keep your social media image and reputation on a career-oriented plane. You can add any personal accounts you would like to be consulted in the description or biography portion of your profile as an option to learn more about your personal hobbies and interests.

Building your online presence

Consider your brand when you build your online presence. Your brand is how others perceive you. One of Heather’s first lessons in her career was that perception is reality. Have you ever heard that phrase? How you are perceived is the reality of your brand. Your brand should reflect the reality of the way you show up in the real world and online in the virtual world. You don’t need to display perfection. It is important to be authentic when you build your online personality and presence. Consistency is also essential in building your presence. You will need to remain true to your brand on social media in order to be successful. That doesn’t mean that you cannot evolve and grow; that is normal.

Create your profile using your brand. This will be key in building your online presence. Your brand should be meaningful and memorable, but also adaptable. Think about your skills and experiences, values, ideals, and principles that are important...

Add visual elements

Social media accounts with visuals enable richer and deeper engagement from followers and potential followers. Start by considering visuals for your profile avatar and your profile’s background image. Almost all social media platforms provide the ability to include a profile and a background photograph. You should upload a photo that captures your face and shoulders. Having your shoulders visible in a photo has been shown to build more trust. This type of photograph is often called a headshot. For your background image, choose something that relates to your professional profile and ensure that it works well when displayed together with your headshot. It could be a location or related to an area of interest you have in technology, for example. Select a high-quality photograph for both your headshot and your background photograph. Profiles will look different depending on the social media network or service you are using.

Your profiles will include slightly...

Creating content

Think about how you express your brand in writing and conversation. Determine keywords and hashtags that are relevant to you and your career. Ask questions, comment, and repost/share posts related to these areas.

Select keywords and hashtags that you want to incorporate for posting and engaging with content. For instance, if you are a Java developer, you would want to focus on keywords and hashtags relevant to your area of expertise, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, microservices, big data, developers, careers, language features, and Java releases. Incorporate these keywords and hashtags into your posts and utilize multiple hashtags per post.

Think about the areas of content and topics that you want to generate content for. You should designate core and related topics and ensure you spend the majority of your time and posts on your core topics. For a few suggestions, refer to the following list:

• Core topics: Things you spend the majority...

Reaching out to people

In order to achieve that “network effect” of social media, you need to build your social connections and network on the selected social media channels. In order to do that, you need to continue to be authentic and allow your audience to know, like, and trust you. This can be achieved by teaching, inspiring, and connecting with them. People respond to positive people who support them, lift them up, and inspire them. Inspired people inspire people, as the saying goes. How do you start to do this? You need to share yourself. Show your face and let your audience get to know you and about you in the content that you post. If your content is consistent with your profile, people know that they can trust you, which puts you in a prime position to start reaching out to build your network on social media.

Similarly, as with the topic and keywords you identified to utilize in your content, identify your ideal followers or audience in these areas. You can...

Interviews

Mary Grygleski

Q: Hi, Mary. How are you today? I’m so happy you’re going to be sharing with us a little bit about your career. Why don’t we start with you telling us your full name and what you’re doing now in your career, and how you got started in your career as a developer?

A: My name is Mary Grygleski. I’m currently the developer advocate for the streaming team at DataStax.

DataStax is a company that primarily does Apache Cassandra and open source stuff. Then, two years ago, they started also incorporating Apache Pulsar to support more new features, such as event streaming, so I got hired for the streaming team.

I’m a developer advocate, so I go out and do outreach work: doing presentations, going to conferences, and contributing to books such as this one. There are a lot of virtual conferences and outreach opportunities, and I enjoy it a lot.

As for how I got here, it’s actually very interesting. I didn...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the basics of social media for technical career development, personal versus professional social media usage, how to build your online presence, and how to reach out to people and have meaningful and career-advancing conversations on social media.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how in-person conferences, or even sometimes virtual conferences, can be used to advance your career.