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Advice to new grads, Volume 3: The traditional “stay off social” advice misses the point entirely.
Two things are simultaneously true: social media is a time suck that can catastrophically damage your career. But you can capitalize off it, for your company and yourself.
You’ll hear a lot of advice from people who insist it’s all garbage. Their rationale isn’t wrong. They just never figured out that second part.
That's normal. Most people have no clue how to use social for their benefit.
The purpose of social media is to make absurd amounts of money for the companies who own them. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and yes even boring old LinkedIn.
The model is simple: make it addictive and make it free.
👉The product isn’t memes, gifs and video. The product is *you*.
Your time and attention is sold to the highest bidder. Literally. They make their money off bid-based advertising.
It may seem all well and good until you’ve realized you’ve wasted hundreds of hours on nothing. Or worse, you overshared, posted something dumb and your coworkers (or company you’re interviewing with) saw.
The road to unemployment is paved with people who canceled themselves.
But what most people miss: the social giants have to share the wealth. Someone has to capture everyone’s attention to begin with. And that can be you.
Marketers get this. (At least I hope). Few others do.
And I don’t mean attention craving social influencers. The Charli D'amelio’s of the world are outliers. That won’t ever be you. (Feel free to dream big and prove me wrong...)
Real businesses are being built on brand. And brands are being built on social. Everything from side hustles to small businesses to billion dollar startups.
Hirewell doubled in size in the last year. A few things that contributed to this, but one of the big ones was our social presence. 40% of our hires first heard of us via our LinkedIn activity. And that’s not even counting the millions in inbound and referral-based revenue that directly or indirectly came from it.
I’m not ashamed to say I put my 10,000 hours in. I’ve trolled the Internet since the 90’s, written blogs, run social accounts, sh*tposted for fun, etc. All before I made my first sarcastic LinkedIn comment.
There’s a fine line between time wasted and time well spent. I straddled it for sure.
👉But The Hill I’ll Die On™️ here: people who use social for play but never for work are out of their minds.
There's so much to gain and so few who know how to do it. The ones who do have an incredible life skill.
PS: Before you start your next job, check out your manager's social profiles. You never know what you'll find out...
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