Chapter 20

PICKING AN APPROPRIATE SOCIAL PLATFORM

OUR TEAM IS SPREAD ACROSS several countries and time zones; as a result, we don’t have the ability to really get to know our coworkers. We’re not like the coworkers who share an office. We can’t easily know what a colleague is wearing on a particular day, how they’re feeling, or what their weekend plans are. When we talk, the communication method we use the most, often daily, is video conferencing. Each time we have a meeting, we need to plan out our time in advance, settle on an agenda, and work hard within a limited amount of time and with the precision of a surgeon to reach consensus. In this kind of work environment, we may check in with each other quickly at the beginning of the meeting but not much personal information is shared. I find personal connections are hard to build in this work environment, and without such connections, sometimes I wonder if maybe I just appear as if I’m cold and unfeeling and my only function is to work myself to the bone.

I’ve decided that getting my coworkers to understand me and not just see me for my work ability is pretty important. To this end, I’ve started to draft a plan to show who I am outside work. Currently, I’ve noticed that one of the most effective ways to introduce my personality is through social media including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other sites and platforms.

It can’t hurt for introverts who value privacy at work to use different social media to try to shorten the distance between themselves and their colleagues. Generally speaking, I use Facebook to communicate with friends, to post family pics, fun activities, and trips, and to relay more personal information. LinkedIn, on the other hand, I use strictly for professional purposes and to communicate with my coworkers. The things I share on LinkedIn are pretty much just information on industry trends and other related activities and events. I even have foreign business associates who don’t bother with traditional business cards anymore. They just connect directly with each other through LinkedIn.

The situation in some countries might not be the same, though. For example, in some Asian countries, LinkedIn’s footprint isn’t very big yet, and it’s not likely to replace Facebook’s, which people tend to use for professional purposes as well as personal. With that being said, you might use social media a little differently when you’re in a different country. After carefully going through your privacy settings, you can share articles on current events through targeted marketing, research, or the workplace, and you can provide your own viewpoints. You can also show a side of yourself that’s not easily found when you’re in your nine-to-five environment.

There is a science to picking a platform, however. Based on what Jennifer Kahnweiler shared in Quiet Influence: The Introvert’s Guide to Making a Difference, social media researcher Gina Carr describes Twitter as being the equivalent of a cocktail party conversation. The posts are short, swift, and to the point and don’t have to be deep, but they can be broad/far-reaching. You can meet people from completely different backgrounds using Twitter too. Carr describes Facebook as similar to a backyard barbecue party. You have some degree of connection with your contacts, close or distant, as you do with the other guests at a barbecue. You can establish your own community with these connections.

When finding common non-work-related topics, interacting on social media is no less effective than socializing face to face. Even when you meet internet friends in real life, it feels as if you’ve already known them forever. You can skip small talk and get right to the point. It’s just perfect! For introverts, this is a strategy worth trying.

Another effective platform is the group platform made up of Facebook Community Pages or LinkedIn Groups (hereafter, Facebook and LinkedIn communities). Instead of having your personal information be the focus of your personal page, you can use social media groups like Facebook and LinkedIn communities to communicate with a group of people with commonalities; everyone can share and exchange their ideas. I’m not involved in any more than a handful of communities on social media, but I actively communicate with other people in the groups. Even if I don’t leave comments or speak up in ongoing discussions, I at least click the Like button a lot. We once had an in-person network gathering for one of the communities of which I’m a member. The other people who showed up were business professionals with similar interests. Of course, we couldn’t avoid introducing ourselves. Right when I was nervously standing up and started to utter the words “I’m Jill, I . . . ,” several participants suddenly blurted out, “Ha ha, you don’t need to give an introduction! Everyone here already knows you!” This is an example of the visibility I gain through using social media. For introverts, it’s also an example of how you can avoid having to market yourself to people you’re meeting for the first time.

You may be wondering how to draw people to your social media pages. My methods for attracting people to my Facebook page weren’t too “professional.” What I mean is that all I did was change my background to a picture related to my favorite sport of all—baseball. This might seem trivial, but I promise it was useful, at least for North Americans and East Asians; you can immediately bridge the gap between yourself and others by doing something similar. When it comes to the first step in optimizing your social media account, among all the expert professional opinions, I think the most pertinent is that of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist, a New York Times columnist, and the author of Everybody Lies. When he was asked about how to attract more people to click over to your profile, he said, “The sensible strategy is to replace an okay profile picture with a really good one.” His personal experience with a dating profile change worked well.

USING YOUR WRITING TO EXPRESS YOUR IDEAS

Although social media is a fast and convenient form of communication, it’s not good at documenting past information. When someone adds you as a friend, if all your recent posts are not relevant and/or entertaining, they’re not likely to give you any credibility toward your overall business image. Your new contacts might not know where to go to find your more serious content. Moreover, the layout of the platform might not be easy on the eyes for in-depth articles you post and/or for articles in which photos/illustrations are needed in-between paragraphs.

As you know, written expression is an important weapon in the introvert’s arsenal. Because of this, if you need to use your writing to establish your influence, I recommend that you also use other forms of media, such as blogs, websites, or internet newspaper columns in addition to social media. Use these methods to perfect the expression of your viewpoints and promote your ideas.

As an introvert, you may find marketing yourself through writing to be a much more effective way for conducting business than meeting face to face. For a while I had an established column on the professional women’s platform CAREhER. I wrote articles for less than two years, but even now, a couple of years after I stopped writing, I’ve been approached by some people who got to know my stances and my business acumen through that column. People continue to find me through various online platforms and hire me for consultations. Now that I think back on it, even though it took a lot of time to write those long pieces for CAREhER, because I didn’t have a word limit, I could express my ideas fully and share my feelings on various topics, as well as interact with others. I find this deeper communication to actually be more effective than social media.

Georgetown University associate professor Cal Newport has never used social media; he actually believes that everyone should quit using it. His reasoning is that “the creativity on social media is just way too simplistic, even going to the point that there’s no market value whatsoever. If we can spend long amounts of time engaged in deeper, more meaningful and valuable creation or study, then even if you don’t have Instagram, people will still find you. And the reason for this is because your products will have a market value.”

BEING STRATEGICALLY EFFICIENT

In her book, The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms, Beth Buelow reminds us that social media has its merits, but in essence, it’s also a time and energy vampire. It’s like what Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, said: “Technology is an accelerator for a company’s kinetic energy, not an innovation machine.” If you put too much effort into running social media, you’ll be unable to focus on your actual work; that’s definitely something you want to avoid.

Social media isn’t a panacea. It’s incapable of replacing human contact. To say it a little more bluntly, you’ll waste too much time and energy trying to manage your accounts if there’s no big correlation between using social media and your work. If there’s no way for social media to make your efforts more precise and more effective, then all it is is a toy that will distract you from making any real progress. No matter whether you’re investing money, time, or energy, Buelow suggests that you spend some time investigating your purpose in using social media so you can work on using it more effectively.

BEFORE YOU START USING SOCIAL MEDIA

Here are the questions Beth Buelow suggests you consider before you get set up:

    Where do your target audiences hang out on the internet and what do they want to read?

    How available do you want to be?

    Is the platform you chose reliable? Is it user-friendly? Does it have a large coverage/spread over the market?

    Does the platform allow you to share your content easily?

    Is the focus of the platform business, personal, or both?

PROTECTING YOUR PERSONAL SPACE

Introverts put a lot of emphasis on privacy. I honestly don’t like to put my personal affairs online. However, because of the public nature of my work, many Facebook users will go out of their way to add me as a friend. When I first began my online presence, I wouldn’t add anyone who I hadn’t met before in the flesh or that I didn’t know of. Later on, when I started to use my private Facebook page as a platform on which my connections could exchange information, almost like it was a mini Craigslist (I might provide and match funding information, for example), I realized that if I was always so closed off from the general public, I wouldn’t be able to help as many people. That’s when I started to relax my friend-adding standards. I discovered that as long as I planned everything carefully, I could still reach a balance between my private life and communicating with the broader public. Take, for example, the way I can carefully distinguish/categorize who my target audience is through my privacy settings. Even though I end up having to spend more time to sort and organize my group lists, I can keep people I barely know from finding out more private things about me. For example, when I shared some recent frustration and was seeking support and advice from friends, I blocked the category “business partners” because they don’t need to know the personal challenges I’m facing.