Let’s face it: Everybody is on social media, even if it's not always on the same platforms. We all spend hours on our preferred platforms, scrolling through content and ideas from our feeds that, in most cases, are tailored to our respective likes and interests.

But have you ever stopped and wondered about how useful your social media profile is, or if it’s as handy as a customised feed? media update’s Maryna Steyn certainly has and lays out all the answers right here!

Let’s take a look at three reasons why your social media profiles are invaluable:

1. Social media profiles help you build relationships

Social media helps to build trust and relationships in the virtual world. And an individual user’s profile is the starting point in doing so — it allows them to connect with colleagues and other individuals. Users are then able to view curated content from their network.

The two types of relationships that users can build on social media are as follows:

Internal relationships: These relationships are with colleagues and other employees from a user’s place of employment. It also includes individuals that a person may work with every day, such as distributors, sellers or consultants.

External relationships: These relationships are shared with individuals in your industry that you briefly meet and connect with and don’t communicate with often.

These two types of relationships are a vital part of a quality network of connections that can potentially boost your career or lead to new opportunities. How to best utilise these networks is a new area of knowledge known as network intelligence (NQ).

2. Social media profiles promotes personal branding

If you are career driven, then you need a social media profile that’s crafted to your personal brand. But what does this mean?

Similar to household names that are instantly recognisable, who you are should be identifiable too. Your profile should reflect what you want people to associate you with — that’s what your personal brand is.

But be sure to remain authentic and true in the representation of yourself.

On top of being your own brand, your profile allows you to create an online persona. This is likened to a “virtual personality” that helps colleagues and other connections to get to know you. Even potential employers will head over to your social media to see what your personal brand is all about.

The online persona fills the gap between the virtual and the real world and assists in making your interactions feel more genuine and personal. Dare we say, more human.

3. Social media profiles engage the right people

Engaging with relevant individuals and topics from your industry helps you to stay on top of emerging trends — and believe it or not, your social media profile facilitates this.

On some social media profiles, users can follow hashtags about topics that they are interested in as well as pages about specific topics. Thus, a completed, strong profile allows you to be discoverable by ‘the right people’. In essence, it connects people who may otherwise have never met in real life simply because you like the same things.

And this is one of the many reasons why social media is so important — it allows users to expand their influence and develop different social media skills through networking. Talk about multi-tasking!

Social media makes it possible by allowing users to:
  • connect with groups or event pages and start important conversations
  • regularly add new people that they have met or networked with
  • create posts about industry relevant questions, and
  • create engaging content that is sharable with others.
Have you found it beneficial to have a well crafted social media profile? Let us know in the comments below.

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Now that you know how important your social media profile is, you need to ask: Are you using the right social media platforms for your brand?
*Image courtesy of Vecteezy