By Suryam Srivastava / Debashis Banerjee
It is a well-known fact that we learn more from our society, culture and community than any other thing. Earlier, these things were determined by the magical fate of our birth. We eventually get accustomed with the environment that we live in, and that pond appears as the mirage of an ocean. Time and again we try to come out of that barrier but are pulled back by others just like crabs in the bucket.
Nowadays, we can overcome this barrier very easily through Social Media. It provides us a platform to pitch in our opinions, join new communities, connect with people of similar thinking, share our knowledge, hunt for new jobs, etc.
Social media is a pervasive part of any communication in today’s world, it endeavors in augmenting your visibility to the giant living world connected virtually to each other.
To broaden my visibility and letting my opinions create the best of its impression, I enrolled for SAP Social Media Mentoring program. SAP is running unique program where senior leaders are being mentored by young talents at SAP to be more social media savvy.
These are the few learning of our journey so far of what I and my social media buddy learnt together:
- SAP Community, a place to get social with SAP-connected people.
- Media can be internal to company (like SAP jam) or external (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.).
- LinkedIn is best suited for deeper content.
- Twitter is for short messages (though the character limit is now gone).
- While Instagram and Facebook are optional for professional use, personally for me I’ve always thought of those as personal space in social media.
- Things work well when you review each other’s official posts.
- Timing: depending on the audience, time your posts.
- Not too many pictures else the message gets diluted (this is not your set of vacation pictures).
- Tag, tag, tag - the right tags so it becomes visible - be it SAP or say sapforgood tags etc.
- Review analytics - both LinkedIn and Twitter have analytics on posts, which gives you an idea of measurement on the impact that your post has made.
- Cross link - each media can reference the other, so reference a twitter post of LinkedIn or vice versa.This is known as back linking.
Finally, we would like to say, this is just another example of how SAP gives everyone an opportunity to continually learn across generations.
More than becoming social media savvy, we made a new friend – and learnt each other’s perspective that generational barriers are easily overcome at workplace, all you need is a little effort.
