Work and Social Media, Do you know the rules?

I currently have a full time position where I work with social media all day long. While I only manage one brand, there is a lot of research that goes into finding good content to post, plan for the next week, and so on. That being said, I check Facebook about 10 times a day. While I don’t check it right when I wake up unless it is the weekend, I work with Facebook and am on it constantly. While I manage a separate page, all of the groups I monitor are linked to my personal page and in checking all of them periodically, I also check in on what my friends are doing for a couple of minutes here and there.

My company logs every site that we go on and I think it is completely ethical to do so. I know that I am being tracked because I am constantly coming across sites that are blocked while I am doing research and I know that is monitored. Ethically, I think that as long as it is acknowledged that they will be tracked it is fine. I think that while it should be common sense that everything can be tracked, I think it should be written down in an employee contract so that people really do understand the implications of what they are doing. Unfortunately, people still do not understand what they are doing when they are on social media at work.

I personally have my place of work show on my Facebook and LinkedIn page, however I am also very focused on not posting anything inappropriate on social media. I feel that I am my own brand and I am my own advocate and if I do not think it is in my best interest, I don’t post it. I don’t think posting something about having a busy day or a stressful day is a bad thing, however posting about being drunk or any kind of lewd behavior would make me think that it might just be easier to not attach anything to my profiles.

While I think that there are some policies that are more strict, I do think that there should be some kind concept of not allowing social media to overwhelm their work mainly because social media is a major distraction. While some people can handle it properly and only check things occasionally as a break, some people truly are addicted to checking and monitoring social media and it can create a really stagnant work environment where not a lot of things are getting done.

Results of my First Survey!

When I first set out to make this survey, I was hoping for a LOT of engagement, interaction and people taking my survey. This is not what happened, at all. I shared this survey on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Between those three social media platforms, I have 1,500 connections. While there is some overlap, I can still safely say that I have 1,000 connections. I received 96 completed survey results. This is after friends of mine shared the survey as well, which brought the amount of people who saw my survey up to 2,500. This means that the amount of people who saw me or a friend of mine request survey results and completed the survey is 0.038%. WHAT?! While I knew that it would be hard to get people to take my survey, I really didn’t think it would be THIS hard. Especially since I was asking about social media, on various social media platforms.

Results:

Of the 96 people who took my survey, 21 were male and 75 were female

8% of people fell between 18-22 years old, 40% of people were between 23-27, 14% were between 28-32, 14% were between 33-37, 5% were between 38-42, 3% were between 43-47 and 16% were over the age of 48

60% had a Bachelor’s Degree, with 15% with a Master’s Degree and 13% only finished some college

77% of people did not have children, with 23% having children. Of that, 41% have only one child and 36% have 2 children

97% of people do use social media platforms, with 3% saying no they did not use social media platforms

Of the people who do use social media, 92% use their real names while 8% use fake names, when asked why a fake name would be used, the biggest response was that it was due to privacy concerns and not wanting their company to be able to find them on social media

When asked how please people are with the privacy level of the content an individual themselves places on social media, the results are:

I find this very interesting since so many people constantly complain when a new Facebook feature has been added that changes the privacy settings. The fact that only 21% of people are displeased in some way means that the people who get very upset about privacy and complain about it ad nauseam does not necessarily mean that they will partake in a survey.

So how often are people using various social media platforms?

While I am not shocked that Facebook is used the most, I am a little more surprised that more people are not using Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Instagram. I knew that Myspace and Google+ would be a long shot, but I really thought that more people would use the other social media platforms more.

Put the social media platforms in the order of your preference

I put this question in as a safeguard against lying. For instance, if all of a sudden Myspace had come up as the third or fourth preference I would know that people were not paying attention to what they were choosing as an option. However, I think that these results match the previous results very well, which means that people didn’t lie! I am excited about this since I was very nervous of whether or not people would be honest.

While I am thrilled that I got these results, I do realize a lot of mistakes that I made that I could fix in the future. I missed a lot of data gathering information when I did not ask more about age groups, education levels, or even offer more social media platforms. I completely forgot to include YouTube or Tumblr. I know there are a lot more social media platforms, but those two are pretty popular and should have been included. I think that learning to include more questions, as well as figuring out exactly what information I want would help me a lot so that I would really be able to pinpoint the information that I wanted to know. Let me know what you think!

Social Media Survey

This week I worked on creating an online survey. Since I am focused on learning more about social media platforms, that was what I decided to focus on. I want to know more about why people choose to connect on various social media platforms. For instance, I use my Facebook to connect with people, my Pinterest to learn new things that I can buy or create, LinkedIn to grow a professional network, Instagram to see my friends pictures and to log my weight loss journey and my life, Google+ to connect with more people and Twitter to see what other people are talking about.

However, I know that not everyone uses their social media platforms the same way. Some people use them for completely different reasons and others don’t use some of them at all! That is why I would like to learn why people are using or not using various platforms. I also would like to learn how often people use the sites. I may think using a site “frequently” means using it daily, while the same wording may mean using it weekly to someone else. That is why I was careful to use intervals when asking how often people use the various sites.

I also asked people to put the social media platforms in the order of their preference so that I can have an idea of which ones are preferred. Another aspect of what I want to learn with this survey is how many people complete a survey. I made this survey fairly short, only 15 questions, but I think it will be interesting to see how many people just stop in the middle of the survey. I included two open-ended questions to see if that is what prompts people to exit.

I also made sure that I used various scales so that I could tell if people were actually paying attention to what they were choosing, or if they were just selecting things at random to quickly finish. I am hoping that people will be truthful, since it is a really quick and easy survey!

However, I know that not everyone will be, it is an unfortunate fact of survey results.

In the end I am hoping to learn a lot from my results, but the truth is that I have already learned a lot just making the survey! I had never made a survey before and it is a really difficult process. Thinking of the questions and how to word them is very complicated. Another problem I now realize is forgetting things. For instance I realize that I didn’t include YouTube, which is a social media platform. Well, you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20.

If you would like to take the survey to help me out, you can here.

Also, feel free to chime in below and let me know what you thought!!

Ways to Make Sure Your LinkedIn Profile Stands Out

Before doing the readings for this week, I thought I had a decent LinkedIn profile. I had 257 connections, a decent picture, experiences listed, and had been endorsed for various skills. I have even had head hunters reach out to me based on my profile, and yet, as LinkedIn grows in popularity, we need to find more ways to stand out and my profile doesn’t make the cut. I learned that I need to add a headline with keywords as well as a summary. I would look at the side circle that tells you how your profile is doing, and when it said my profile strength was all-star, I believed it.

I was wrong. Now, I knew enough to not have my Facebook or Twitter status updates link to my professional page, but really I didn’t know more than that. Until today. Libby Kane makes a few great points on how to improve interaction and profiles on LinkedIn. For instance, she talks about making sure there is a picture on your profile, and to have a status update every few days. Not one where you talk about a party you went to, but talk about what you are working on at work. Even if it is about a meeting you learned a lot at, it is always beneficial to keep your content fresh and let people know what is going on with you professionally.

Another big part of being on LinkedIn, is protecting your profile and reputation. Viveka talks more about how to ensure that you are able to maintain your identity online. She specifically talks about making sure that you add all of your emails to your profile so that you can make sure no one can set up a fake account in your name. I was shocked to see this, but truthfully it makes a lot of sense. There is a lot of personal information on these pages, first job, high school you graduated from, lots of things that identify you but if it is stolen your entire identity may be at risk.

On the left is a partial picture of a great infographic called, Job Hunting? by Reed Marketing and Creative. The picture makes a lot of great points including the fact that even if you don’t post anything too personal on your LinkedIn, don’t think you can post photos of incriminating behavior on other sites and it won’t be found. With the internet becoming more and more accessible, a good rule of thumb is thinking that every social media site is open to any viewers. Even if you have strict privacy settings on, the truth is anyone can screenshot your information or save a photo to their own computer, so you never really know what happens to the information that you put out there.

Making sure that you keep an eye on what gets out on any of your social media profiles will help you fine tune what is seen on all platforms and will help you build your brand. Another great point was made by Lewis Howes, is to “make a call to action.” He makes a great point that even if you make a great profile, if you don’t tell people to get in touch with you, or tell them to contact you for more information, they won’t. I think that is a great idea and after learning all of these things I will be spending time creating a much better LinkedIn profile for myself.

What about you? How will you update your profile with all of the new information on how to improve your LinkedIn profile? Do you agree that people should monitor all of their social media sites and keep them all semi-professional, or do you think on other sites you should be able to post whatever you want? Chime in and let me know!