Week II Pt I: Tools for Business & Personal Social Media

The handyman carries a single bag of tools for many purposes. The craftsman has infinite variations of the same tool for a singular purpose. A handyman might be able to build, install, and fix up a majority of the basics in any house, but to create something so unique it catches the eyes of anyone who walks past the living room requires the specialization of a craftsman.

How many apps do you use to, say, post a picture on your social media page? There is a massive spectrum of social media users, and the answer to this question lies somewhere in their midst. Really understanding this spectrum is the key to knowing which social media tools to use for maximum effectivity in your personal or business life.

A novice grandmother posting for the first time on Facebook may feel hugely accomplished from managing to successfully share a family vacation photo with a short caption. 

The next day, her middle school granddaughter may share the same photo by the lake on Twitter with an equally short but doubly clever caption that makes her classmates giggle. 

A few years later, she might find her knack in high school as an outdoorswoman and, returning to the same lake, she recreates the photo. This time, before posting it, she takes as long as her grandma did – but she is much more advanced. Polishing the image on VSCO before adding just the right amount of her favorite Instagram filter, she makes sure it matches her profile's vibe and sends it off with a smile. Then, using the built-in functionalities on Instagram, that picture proliferates onto her Facebook and Twitter, where the same group of people, give or take a few friends, enjoy her quality image. 

Another five years down the line, she is the marketing manager of her university's outdoors club. After a freshman orientation trip finds her group smiling in a picture at the same lake, she takes over an hour on campus to carefully adjust it on Photoshop. Patiently, she brings out the colors and emotions she feels will reflect her organization's goals online. It wins the athletics department's Facebook cover of the month, an award that she includes in her digital resume on LinkedIn. Gradually she continues to stretch her feelers out into digital marketing, making the club's brand not only a strong university group, but a local favorite online. Eventually she is hired by the athletics department to run their social media too.

Before she knows it, she graduates and becomes the Director of Marketing at a local nitro-brew coffee startup. She leads a team of graphic designers and web developers to create a meticulously designed campaign appealing to the critical tastes of their target market. As the team lead, she uses the company's budget to hire a well-established product photographer, a quick and successful writer for digital copy, and an in-house editor to keep branding consistent across all platforms.

From a single blog post on Blogger, she is able to extract twelve cheeky lines as individual Tweets, four friendly paragraphs for eight different Facebook posts, and ten sensual quotes as captions on Instagram. Thirty of the photographer's most contemporary images are divided to complement each of the texts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. A visual album is put together from the remaining photos, to be posted on the company's Reddit and Imgur accounts. The nitro-brew's LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter pages become some of the most professionally appealing ones in town, and they quickly become more than a local sensation.

In her youth, the young woman slowly found her way into the digital handyman's bag for personal projects, perhaps only using, say, the carving tool. By the time she was stepping into adulthood, she had sharpened her skillset to the specific nuance and talents of a visual and social craftswoman.  Before she knew it, she had a wall full of specialized carvers to cut, bevel, emboss, and engrave every shape, divot, and embellishment known to mankind. So what was the key?

The key was in finding her own way through pre-existing tools developed for people from any background to succeed online.

The parable of the young girl answers our question about the use of different social media platforms for personal or business use. Some sites are far better specialized for business and advertisement, like Google and Google AdWords, Facebook and Facebook Business Manager, and Twitter/Instagram Verified Accounts. These collect massive data about user interests to enable far more incisive targeting tools than sites like Imgur or Vimeo do. Other platforms instead can be equally specialized for personal use and promotion, especially in context of the visual arts, take Tumblr, Pinterest, and Reddit. Still others find a perfect balance between the two, in fact, the most prevalent loom over both: YouTube, Facebook, and Google. These sites' ability to showcase a person's talents and a business's offers are unrivaled, and consumers know this. We all gravitate to the platforms that plug us in, and plug into to us, at the most points possible, whether personal or professional. So how do we leverage this broad-serving spectrum?

When it comes down to it, a voracious and successful business craftsman focuses not on which platforms to use, but which not to use. Gary Vaynerchuk, a personable business and social media mogul, emphasizes the cold reality of this important maxim: to be anywhere, as a business, you have to be everywhere. Still, by the same token, what is a massive social campaign if not a connection to hundreds of thousands of people, individual by individual? The most successful social media managers are able to begin a personal conversation with every user that reads their post, even if only in passing. With both sides of the coin in mind, we start emulating the granddaughter: aggressively potent in business, but from a place of soft personal talent, of relatable artistry. Even in the most corporate of settings.

All in all, regardless of the present, the advent of social media was pointed towards a network of connections. Those relationships can be personal, professional, and every single dynamic in between. Though there are clearly specialized tools for the craftswomen of advertising and the craftsmen of networking, the fact of the matter is that digital social presence is a consequence of nothing more than individuality. The granddaughter that found a sophisticated career from a simple personal use for social media is our exemplification of this. As soon as we channel what we know and excel at within, we find unavoidable success without.

Yours,

Zack