Three Steps Toward a Powerful—and Professional—Social Media Presence

Key Takeaways

• Building a social media presence simply requires some forethought and consistent (but small) time investments each week.
• Start by creating a strong profile that tells your story and outlines your skills and goals.
• To launch your networking game, focus on your peers and people who are a few steps ahead of you professionally.

If you’re looking for a better job or simply to raise your presence in the field, a strong profile on professional online platforms is expected these days. And, if investing a mere hour or two twice a week can easily elevate your profile and your networking game, there’s really no excuse for continuing to let a weak presence drag your potential down.

So, whether you’re looking at LinkedIn to aid your job search or wanting to polish your GitHub and Slack Overflow profiles and presence, the following three steps offer strong starting points.

Step 1: Brainstorming

A strong, professional profile needs strong content—and strong ideas to build it from. Before you start, brainstorm on and write out all of your

• Skills, including hard and soft skills
• Strengths, including those you posses and those you’d like to master
• Professional experiences, including work, volunteer, internships, and contributions to course or online projects
• Goals, including immediate-, near-, and long-term plans and aspirations

All of this free-form brainstorming will produce the fodder you need to build your profile and your presence.

Step 2: Creating a Professional Profile

Ensure the following elements present you in the best professional light:

• Profile photo: Here, go with headshot only; make sure it’s high quality, recent, and—unless you’re a high-powered CEO? Skip the hiking photo in favor of an on-the-job vibe.
• Background picture: This image should convey something meaningful about your professional life or goals. For inspiration, you can browse the profiles of industry pros and check out software engineering backgrounds at places like Canva and Freepik.
• Title and/or aspiration: This typically includes skill keywords that give people a shorthand understanding of your existing or desired professional role, e.g., “Programming | Code Optimization | APIs | Team Leadership | Adaptability.”
• Summary: It might be tempting to simply unfurl your resume here, but your best approach is to use your brainstorm words and discoveries to tell a story about who you are, what you want, and why you are passionate about your field.
• Education/experience: This is closer to resume-dump territory, but keep it brief and highlight your key skills, accomplishments, and keywords.

Stage 3: Networking and Contributing

If you’re looking for work and/or career advancement, a social media profile is important—and it may be all you need to support your job search and attract the attention of recruiters. But if your goal is to elevate your presence and connect with people in the industry, it helps to have a networking and contribution strategy.

Connecting Effectively

Who doesn’t want to connect with CEOs and lead researchers at cutting-edge labs? But, while there’s no harm in clicking “Connect” with industry leaders, you’re more likely to reap benefits by connecting—and engaging—with peers and people who are at most a few rungs above you on the professional ladder.

If there are companies you admire or would love to work for, send connect requests to people doing or managing your roles at those companies. Do the same at research labs, graduate schools, and so on. Over time, these people will help you find other people with similar goals or experiences you can learn from.

Creating Content, Strengthening Connections

Once you hit that connect button (in whatever form it takes), you can content yourself with numbers alone or actually start building real relationships. Online, this is best facilitated by your active contributions to the platform.

While “liking” posts and clicking emojis is proof of online life, it’s far more effective to actively put yourself out there. Start by reading the content of people you’ve connected with, then comment thoughtfully and let these existing posts inspire your own posts.