Social+Networking+and+Media+and+Design+Professionals

=Social Networking and Media, and the Design Professional, by Rachel Hooper= Facebook has a lot of potential for graphic design professionals. You can make your fans aware of your new work, direct them to your professional website or blog, have your work seen by potential new clients, and connect with other designers. Facebook makes this fairly easy by offering the option to set up groups to invite other graphic designers to participate in. If you are not a fan of Facebook groups or their new collaboration feature, LinkedIn may work better for you, as it is specifically designed for business networking. LinkedIn is an especially good site for college students looking to dip their toe in professional waters and start building professional contacts, and are actually LinkedIn’s fastest-growing demographic.  A great option to advertise your business is to offer your services through a service like the couponing site [|Groupon], which gives you the option to sell a block of your services at a discounted rate. This is very appealing to many clients, as everyone likes to feel that they are “winning” a better deal on something. To geek out even further on fan engagement, click on Jeff Bullas’ article 10 powerful tips on increasing fan engagement, which has excellent infographics.

Twitter can be helpful to offer quick updates, links to new work (your own and other designers), and quick quotes or funny bits. A great way to promote your designer business is to create hashtags for your business "brand" like #thedesignerforyou, #htmlmaster, #bestdesignever. You can find more twitter tips at 10 Twitter Tips.

 Blogging sites like Wordpress or Blogger  can be helpful to offer a free blogging platform for designers to talk about their business, to talk up other designers, and to share what keeps you passionate about your work. Blogging can also offer revenue all on its own, from ads or other promotional techniques. People sometimes feel more comfortable with blogs than they do with the more well-known social networking sites like Facebook or Hootsuite. It can be hard to find things to consistently blog about and keep your readers interested. If you use Wordpress, you can schedule your blogs and write them when you have extra time or are feeling particularly inspired. A great way to keep readers clicking is to link to other pages on your blog or other designer or artist blogs that are related in content. You can find other great tips to keep readers on your business blog at Keep Readers From Bouncing.

 You can’t be a blogger without knowing about search engine optimization, and Google’s (fairly) newly updated Knowledge Graph helps you to understand a little more about how their search engine works. Wikipedia is a large part of Google’s search, so it doesn’t hurt to put a page for your business on Wikipedia. For more information, click on How to Be Visible On Google's Knowledge Graph. There is also [|Google Adwords]<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Google’s advertising program that lets you buy ad space and choose keywords for your business. You can target your ads locally and even add your address, which would mean your ad would pop up when someone searches “graphic designer eugene oregon”.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Youtube offers a great opportunity for feedback on your work. You can also post videos of your favorite techniques or things that you’re interested in or excited about in your niche. You could film a cool little video for one of your products, and then share it on all of your social networks, offering to give it away to whomever wins the drawing. If there is more than one person working in your office, you could film videos interviewing each of them so that people feel like they “know” the person who is creating the service or product that you are selling. Design businesses lend themselves well to a more personal touch. GigaOm has more great tips at How to Use Youtube for Business

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Pinterest is very graphic-oriented, and gives you the chance to get good pictures and turn new people on to your work, and brings them back to your professional website. You can add a “pin it” button to your blogging website so that fans of your work can pin your work or things you have posted to their own boards. For more information on making Pinterest work for your business, check out 23 steps to Making Pinterest Work For Your Business<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The picture-sharing websites like Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa can also be helpful to graphic designers. Flickr has a very clean, user-friendly interface and has a lot of very active groups, but does not allow marketing or promotion, so keep that in mind. Definitely be sure to tag the photos that you put on Flickr, but make sure that they are the tags that you want to represent your company. Definitely do tag with “Eugene”, for example, if you’re hoping to drum up local clients and clients who love this area. Obviously the tags to avoid are less professional tags like “woohoopartay!” For more tips on using flickr for your business, see 9 Ways to Use Flickr to Promote Your Business<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Picasa is part of Google and thusly part of their own social networking site Google+, and also offers some options to edit your photos. If you do use Picasa for your business’s photos, be aware that they will link back to your Google+ account, which you can use to your advantage. Just be sure that everything links back to your business accounts and not your personal accounts. Having all of your business’s social networks linked properly can be a plus and present a solid business brand for clients. If you don’t like Picasa linking back to Google+, reference How to stop Picasa links from redirecting to google<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Photobucket has also done quite a bit to make their site more user-friendly, but is mostly used to host photos for another site like ebay. If you do use photobucket to host your photos, be sure to periodically check them to be sure that the link isn’t broken.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Instagram is another photo-sharing site that you can use effectively for your business, using hashtags like you would for Twitter. You can also put up little samples of your work or promos and “invite” certain people to come and look at them. For more tips on using Instagram for your business, visit How to use Instagram for Business<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> There are also services like Constant Contact<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, intended to combine email marketing, online surveys and social media sites to really get your business out there. It really walks you through setting up email lists, with templates and coaching, but it is only free for the first 60 days. Chances are you could set it up yourself with a little research, but if you are looking for something to get you through those baby steps, it might be just the right thing for you.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> After all this talk about the many, many social network and media sites out there, I’m sure you’ve noticed how one social network site (like Myspace) goes by the wayside when another (like Facebook) becomes more popular. How do you keep track of everyone in your contacts list? There is a free service called Plaxo<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, which bills itself as “your address book for life”. Plaxo can lighten the load of your phone’s contacts list, keeping track of everyone and the changes they make online. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">

=<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bibliography =

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Facebook's new collaboration feature 10 Powerful Tips to Increase Fan Engagement on Facebook 10 Twitter Tips Keep Readers From Bouncing Search engine optimization Knowledge Graph How to Be Visible On Google's Knowledge Graph [|Google Adwords] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">How to Use Youtube for Business

23 steps to Making Pinterest Work For Your Business

9 ways to use Flickr to Promote Your Business How to stop Picasa links from redirecting to google

How to use Instagram for Business Reasons why Design Professionals have to use Social Networking Sites HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand The Designer's Survival Guide: Social Networking for Designers Importance of Using Social Networking Sites for a Graphic Designer

Image Sources
How to Build Your Design Business Through Social Networks Your Business on Social Media

Posted by Rachel Hooper