How to Use Social Media in Your Career and Business Social media is making its way into the hearts of many brands and businesses today. What used to be termed “a time-waster” and “a distraction” now helps many enterprises in growing Twitter followers, Instagram followers, and Facebook too, to boost their online presence. As the days go by, social media keeps proving to be a resourceful tool in facilitating business operations and plays a huge role in building a functional career in any field. With billions of people on these platforms, social media has given businesses the opportunity to reach out to a larger audience at a go. And for people who need to build their career, it allows them to connect with other professionals and possible employers from anywhere in the world.

1. How to Use Social Media in Your Career and Business?
How to Use Social Media in Your Career and Business Social media is
making its way into the hearts of many brands and businesses today.
What used to be termed “a time-waster” and “a distraction” now helps
many enterprises in growing Twitter followers, Instagram followers,
and Facebook too, to boost their online presence.
As the days go by, social media keeps proving to be a resourceful tool
in facilitating business operations and plays a huge role in building a
functional career in any field. With billions of people on these
platforms, social media has given businesses the opportunity to reach
out to a larger audience at a go. And for people who need to build
their career, it allows them to connect with other professionals and
possible employers from anywhere in the world.
That said, in this article, we’ll be discussing the best ways to integrate
social media into your career and business to give you a better shot at
growing and becoming successful at what you do.

2. Five Ways to Make the Best out of Social Media and Grow Your Career
If you thought social networking was just for fun and a time-wasting
activity, think again. Social media has become an essential part of how
people communicate, and is often a critical part of the workflow in
various sectors of business and life, from companies to government
agencies. So there are several ways in which social media can help
your career. Here are 7 ways to make the most of social media and
make your career more successful.
Create a Professional Profile
Give your profile a professional look that shows visitors what you
stand for. If you already have an existing profile, you might need to
make some changes. And for new profiles, getting it right saves you
the stress of having to update it frequently.
The first thing you’d have to do is include a display picture of your
brand or business name, or a well-edited photo of yourself, depending
on the products or services you intend to offer.

3. Next, write a short, yet comprehensive detail of what your brand or
business stands for in your bio. Ensure that it highlights your best
skills and each description is free of grammatical error. This will help
people in need of your services locate you more quickly with the help
of the algorithmic system of the social media platform in use.
Showcase your expertise
Job hunting gets easier with social media. Employers and jobseekers
will always find a common ground on social media, especially if they’re
the right match. To save yourself the trouble of having lengthy
conversations or having a potential business partner, employer, or
customer overlook your talent, you need to put it on display.
There are unique features on social media platforms that allow you to
include a link to your portfolio, a link to other professional accounts, or
simply upload images of your products or services where applicable.
This way, prospects can review your skill and expertise before formally
reaching out.

4. Engage in online job platforms
Online job platforms usually contain vital information on how to build
your career and offer value. They also keep you updated on the latest
job trends. By becoming a part of these platforms, you can gain
access to knowledge that’ll help take your business or brand to the
next level.
On some occasions, you could find recruiters and investors that may
be interested in your products or services, which may eventually
prompt them to work with you.
Connect with the community
No man is an island, especially when it comes to business. With social
media, you can connect with like-minds and other individuals or
businesses in the same industry as yours. These experts will give you
insights into the corporate world and the trends that would influence
your decision-making and action plan.

5. When doing this, try not to limit your connection activities to just your
geographical location. As a matter of fact, it is better to connect with
both local and international communities if you want your brand or
business to go global. Connecting with international communities acts
as a form of effective self-advertisement, as partners and investors
from these geographical locations find it easier to hear about your
brand or business and partner with you when the demand for it arises.
Be valuable to the community Social media platforms require
interaction. Try not to be the passive member that only receives
information, but the active member that gives information too. With
your profile, share your opinions, resources, and observations that
could be of interest to other brands and businesses in the community
too. By doing so, you’re building a reputation for yourself and adding
value to the community. Measure results
Results are proof that your efforts are effective. Since you’re utilizing
social media to build your reputation online, you should seek results
over a specific period. For instance, you can google your brand or
business to see the results the search engine brings. You can also try

6. this on other social media platforms, or set a notification that alerts
you when your name is mentioned.
Stay consistent
Do not leave your profile dormant for even a day. Ensure that you’re
actively engaging in tweets or trends that align with your business and
its community. Keep your profile updated by adding new skills and
recent projects you have completed. Consistency will help you achieve
more growth than you desire.
Conclusion Social media is a powerful and resourceful tool. Every
business or brand will find its target audience on social media
platforms, as numerous people visit these platforms every day. With
the right plan, dedication, and consistency, social media could be the
perfect force to skyrocket your career and business.
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7. How my company used social media to increase traffic and
revenue — for free
You know who loves to give advice? Everyone. Especially when it
comes to marketing. But what do you do when that advice requires a
budget—a budget you don’t have? What happens then?
I’m the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and
zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women
single parents in North Macedonia. Operating from a country with
such limited resources can be, to put it mildly, challenging. I founded
the company back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local
designers, which quickly expanded to cover international designers
from all over the world.

9. Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label.
The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I
lived in. At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the
seamstress became a single parent. I was not only impressed by her
strength but also inspired by her tenacity and an iron will to provide
her child with better circumstances than she was born in.
That’s when I made the decision to make Bastet Noir, a socially
responsible brand. And as the business grew, so did our community of
women single parents. Today, we’re proud to say that we work with
five woman-owned studios, operated by either women single parents
or women micro-entrepreneurs.
What used to be a small, local business has grown into—granted, still
small—a global brand with customers from all over the world.
We used every tool in our toolbox to make it happen with virtually no
budget—just a pipe dream and persistence and will to make it real.
Here, I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it
happen.

10. The power of social media for a local business
Even if you don’t choose to invest in social media, you should still
have an up-to-date presence. One way to do this is by automating
your brand’s social media, doing things like automatically sharing all
new blog posts with your followers.
As a bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited
resources, our marketing budget was—and still is—practically
non-existent. Everything we make is reinvested back into our
community of women single parents, so throughout the years, we had
to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was one of
the most successful.
Succeeding on Instagram without a budget
Ok, let’s rewind for a second. When we started out back in 2013,
Instagram still wasn’t a thing. That’s why it took us a while to get to
our desired target market in the United States. When we finally got on

11. the platform two years later, it took us almost a year to decode it and
figure out a way to grow and attract the right followers.
Since we weren’t located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers
were based in Macedonia. The only way to target the U.S. was to pay
for ads—which we, of course, didn’t have the money for. So how did
we make it work? Through a lot of trial and error, yes, but most
importantly, by establishing a captivating and powerful story behind
the brand.
All of our posts and stories aligned with the narrative we were trying
to tell. The gist: we were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially
responsible label that worked with women single parents in North
Macedonia, and we helped these women earn much more than the
industry average monthly income of $300. In addition to the storyline,
the feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for
our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our
label.

12. We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the
copy and research hashtags (we found that sustainability- and small
business-related hashtags were our first priority). For all of this, we
used the social media planning tool Later, which helped us a lot,
especially with the visual part of how the feed would look.
Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media
strategy and our content strategy. We began by using People Map to
create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog. The app
helped us target editors, writers, social media managers for fashion
magazines, and women entrepreneurs, all located in the U.S. Once we
found their profiles, we found their emails—either from their
Instagram profiles or using Rocket Reach.
Note: Be sure to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing
prospects and give people ways to opt out of continued
communication.
We composed an email to each woman, explaining our business and
personalizing it to each recipient to demonstrate our interest (for

13. example, we mentioned what had impressed us about them). Most of
them didn’t respond back, but the ones that did were more than
happy to extend their selfless help: we got a number of women to do
interviews with us for our blog series, Cool Faces of Bastet Noir

14. Since all of these women worked for publications like Harper’s Bazaar,
Vogue Business, and Elle, this enabled us to gain credibility. And since
most of them shared the stories on their social media accounts
(including Instagram), we started getting engagement from their
followers. We even got traction on our website, since they were
sharing the links on their feeds and stories.

15. Since advertising wasn’t an option due to lack of funds, this was the
only way for us to utilize the power of influencers. Our entire
investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to
send them the outfit—and all we asked for in return was a few photos
of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our blog
posts.

16. You can start small even on social. To help, here are three workflows
that can help you automate your Instagram for Business account so
you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.
Using Reddit for marketing
Reddit is a bit tricky because many of the communities prohibit
advertising and, of course, anything they consider spammy, like
sharing discount codes, links to your own website, and even
introducing your brand. That means you need to engage with the
community on another level. Start a conversation, answer questions,
and show that you’re an authority on the topic. Then, if they’re
interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If
you do it before someone asks, you risk being banned from one of the
most engaged internet communities.

17. We joined a few subreddits, including r/findashion, r/ethicalfashion,
and r/Etsy, but r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for
us. This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be
interested in our brand. We started talking with people on various
threads, mostly giving them styling advice. This gradually evolved into
me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course. People
started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the

18. website. And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in
traffic, and orders started rolling in.
How to use YouTube for free marketing
We only started working with YouTubers at the beginning of 2020. I
guess you could say we arrived a bit late to the party, but in our
defense, we truly believed that we weren’t able to afford their
rates—which was true to a point. A YouTuber who has more than
10,000 views on a video charges at least $3,000 for a 30-60-second
brand mention. And that’s just for a mention, not a dedicated brand
video. For a brand like ours, it’s way too expensive.
Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to
promote them for free. First, we prepared a list of hundreds of
YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic. We
found them by searching on YouTube for keywords like “minimal
style,” “ethical fashion,” and “environmentally friendly fashion”—and
several variations. Most of them didn’t even respond back, which
makes sense. But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that
they selflessly offered to cover our brand.

19. Here’s an example from Chloe Kian and one from Cat Creature. These
reviews and their support helped us bring in more traffic to our
website and create brand awareness—and as a result, we saw
increased revenue.
Using Pinterest for eCommerce marketing
Pinterest is the best social media platform for discovering new things
to buy. Since the platform itself is highly visual, people usually go
there to organize their shopping lists—that makes it great for any
eCommerce brand. And if your store is on Shopify, you can use the
Pinterest app to get what they call rich pins, which means that the
description and price on Pinterest will be pulled directly from your
website.
The best way to increase followers and get repins is to use shared
boards, community boards made usually by Pinfluencers (yes, that’s a
thing). And how do you find these boards? You can do a little Google
search, or you can use PinGroupie like we did. PinGroupie lets you find
and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and
other criteria.

20. If you decide to lean into Pinterest for your marketing, here are 5 tips
for using Pinterest for business.
We’re currently members of about eight boards. The most important
one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k
followers. The beauty of these boards is that, once you’ve been
approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of
every follower in that board. That means millions of potential
customers around the world—without investing a single dime. These
boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher
on Google.
One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers. Boards with
fewer followers probably won’t do you any favors—they’ll just sit on
your profile and collect dust.
And there you have it: that’s how we used our no-budget social media
strategy to increase traffic and get sales.

21. This article by Daniela Milosheska was first published on the Zapier
blog. Find the original post here.
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10 ways to build your brand on social media
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22. 10 ways to build your brand on social media
There are many benefits of using social media to grow a business and
to craft an online persona that showcases a brand’s values and
services. A defined social media strategy can help businesses be more
profitable, establish credibility, and gain a strategic edge over the
competition. Social media has become a powerful tool in marketing as
it’s accessible anytime, anywhere, and is a fun, engaging way to share
and collect information.
According to the most recent data from Statista, as of 2021, 82% of
the U.S. population has a profile on social media, with the most
popular platform being Facebook. In 2021, nearly 92% of U.S.
marketers were expected to use social media for marketing purposes.
Planoly consulted research from social media influencers, brand
managers, and marketing agencies to compile 10 of the best ways to
start building your brand on social media.

23. There are various strategies for companies and brands to up their
social media marketing game. It can be something as simple as taking
more time getting to know your audience and creating content
accordingly, or following and engaging with accounts that may be
similar and relevant to your brand. It also helps to include relevant
hashtags—though you don’t go overboard with them in posts. Be sure
to include hashtags that will be of interest to your target audience.
A copy-and-paste approach may seem ideal when posting content
across various social platforms, but sometimes it helps to take the
time to curate and differentiate content for each respective platform.
What draws attention on Facebook may fall into the ether on Twitter
and vice versa. Giving your social accounts a more authentic feel may
require a more unique posting method based on your target audience.
Continue reading for 10 strategies you can use to build your brand on
social media.

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Determine your specialty
Influencers on social media tend to specialize in a certain
area—whether it’s the beauty, parenting, or financial coaching spaces,
specificity is key. Finding a niche can sometimes be challenging for
one with myriad interests, but it helps for an influencer to hone in on

25. a specific audience and establish authority. Your niche is what you’re
genuinely interested in and what suits your personality.
After deciding what you want to focus on, begin creating your posts
around that topic. It helps to tag other accounts closely related to
your topic of interest.
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26. Know your audience and demographic
What does your business know about its customers? What are their
age groups? Where are they located? These are questions that
companies need to ask in order to learn about their customers.
In terms of selecting influencers to represent their brand, companies
will want to partner with influencers followed by the same group of
people who purchase its products and services. Influencers who are
authentic, engaging, and who have an understanding of the brand will
be key to the success of the company’s social media campaigns.

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Target the right social media platforms for your brand
It’s important for a business to know the demographics of its target
market when deciding which social media channels to use. Brands that
are more visual may lean toward Instagram and TikTok, while brands
focused on real-time events may find Twitter to be more suitable.

28. It’s beneficial to define social media goals and to figure out the social
media channels the company’s audience uses in order to develop a
receptive audience. Take time to analyze the type of content the
business is posting on its channels and how the content works for
each social media platform.
As of 2021, for business-to-business companies, Facebook and
LinkedIn tend to be the preferred social media platforms. For
business-to-consumer companies, Facebook and Instagram were the
most popular platforms.

29. Worawee Meepian // Shutterstock
Define your brand’s voice and tone
A brand’s target audience is the most crucial aspect of developing a
voice and tone. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and
consider what would inspire them to take action to buy your
company’s product or follow your brand.

30. Often, companies take more of a general approach, directing social
media posts to a broad audience, but catering to more niche users
may work better. Brands need to think of what it is they wish to
accomplish—when the dust settles, what is the primary purpose?—and
how the answer to that question can resonate long-term with its
audience.
Jacob Lund // Shutterstock

31. Connect with influencers in your industry
Networking on social media has been a way for many companies to
get their name out there and build brand recognition. It’s no different
when influencers decide to join forces, even if just for one specific
event. It can be highly beneficial to collaborate with fellow industry
influencers, whether it’s launching a cross-promotional giveaway
experience or appearing on another influencer’s podcast.
Whether you’re looking to expose your business to a bigger audience,
generate leads, or boost traffic to your blog, partnering with fellow
influencers with a similar target audience can be impactful.
Collaboration can diversify an influencer or company’s possibilities,
build connections, and create more opportunities overall.

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Identify which products or services you want to promote
For the most part, influencers work independently and generate their
own content while integrating a brand’s marketability. For relevant
influencers, creating content takes time; therefore, a brand must
recognize and value the work required in growing that influencer’s
following and establishing their voice.

33. When it comes to promoting products and services, in-demand
influencers tend to lean toward companies that offer paid partnerships
in addition to complimentary products. This is not to say that
influencers will only work with a company that gives away free
products, but the pull of a partnership arrangement is certainly a more
attractive, mutually beneficial arrangement.
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34. Pay attention to trends in social media and video content
Companies should focus on trends to better hone their marketing
efforts. Some trends include the rise of short video content shared on
platforms, such as TikTok, or via Instagram Stories and Youtube
Shorts, all of which have resonated with marketers and brands,
notably throughout the pandemic.
The e-commerce option for social media platforms has also taken off
as brands can connect their online store with their brand’s social
media account, removing the need for a third-party website. Paid
advertising on social media also gives brands the opportunity to
showcase content in front of a target audience.

35. Kaspars Grinvalds // Shutterstock
Be consistent with your social media posts
It can be challenging to post consistently on social media, especially
when managing several social platforms or multiple accounts across
platforms. But consistency is key when it comes to audience
recognition and follower growth and retention.

36. Posting strategically and consistently maximizes your organic reach,
which is the number of people you reach without paying for an ad or
boosting a post. Scheduling your content ahead of time with news or
upcoming events can make it feel more timely. Planning in advance
also allows you to keep a steady stream of posts in front of your
audience at times when you may not be online.
oatawa // Shutterstock

37. Engage with your consumers and followers
Engagement develops customer relationships, builds trust, and helps
businesses reach a larger audience. It’s also a quick way for
companies and influencers to receive feedback on what’s resonating
with their target audience. Some ways that companies and influencers
engage on social media is through responding to comments, sharing
content, responding to direct messages, and creating polls to generate
responses on insights for particular topics.
In most cases, engagement is often more important in terms of
impact than the number of followers, as a business can have 20,000
followers on social media with zero engagement. This results in a low
return on investment. But if there are, say, 5,000 followers with much
higher engagement, a higher ROI makes the business appear more
credible and not like there’s a bunch of ghost followers.

38. AlesiaKan // Shutterstock
Define your metrics of success and use them to inspire future content
In recent years, social media has served as a major tool for businesses
and influencers to have a better understanding of their audience.
There are ways to analyze social media data through built-in insights
and analytics that are provided by most social platforms. These

39. findings show information such as demographics, impressions, and
reach, all of which are essential metrics for building an audience.
Analytics and metrics help to track progress, such as the speed at
which you’re building an audience and which posts are performing
better than others. The posts that do well can be an example of what
may work for similar future posts.
Social media engagement can be a war of attrition, so weeding out
content that is not engaging your target audience will result in a
stronger overall profile and present an image of brand authority.
This story originally appeared on PLANOLYand was produced and
distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
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