5 Ways to Successfully Use Social Media

As a designer and you’re NOT using social media to help market yourself, then you’re missing out on some big opportunities. Your competitors, co-workers and clients are all using social media, which means if you’re not, you’re getting left behind. Social media provides many different ways designers can use it to advance his or her career. Here are six ways you could be using social media to help your grow your design career.

1) Promote Your Work

This is probably the way most creative types would think of using social media. Most designers know about sites such as DesignBump.com or WPVote.com. But there are also communities like Coroflot and deviantART where you can share your portfolio and get feedback. For instance, Dribble.com is a site where you can share small snapshots of your designs for comment and assessment by your fellow designers. Whatever platform you use, social media has changed the way we share, promote and often improve our work.

2) Blog Away

A blog will help in several ways – it can be a platform for quick comments about design news, sharing links or workshopping designs. More importantly, it can help your work and name get found online. A blog can serve as your base of operations on the web, providing a regularly-updated home to your ideas and what inspires you.

3) Profiling

Definitely create “the big three” – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are extremely useful tools for finding work, sharing information and connecting with colleagues and clients alike. As someone who’s trying to exist online, you need to be able to show that you understand these technologies better than the average bear.

4) The Real World

Social media is great for connecting online, but it’s just as important for you to  network in the real world. If you live in a decent-sized city, then chances are there’s a group of tech professionals getting together to discuss business. There are meet-ups of social media professionals, designers and developers, WordPress fans, bloggers – if you can imagine a group of people, then they’re probably out there.

5) Stay True to Yourself

Don’t compromise who you are and what your dreams are just to become more marketable and get work. As designers, we are all unique in our own ways and the the right clients are out there for us, we just have to find them and using social media can greatly increase our chances of doing so.