Social Media has become an unavoidable part of everyone’s life. There is a lot more to Social Media than just marketing. Using Social Media Effectively in your life can take your career to new heights. Here are Eight New Year’s Tips for Effectively using Social Media.

1. Make up your mind to use #SocialMedia not just for interacting with friends, but to develop a network that would help you in your career as well as personal life.
2. Always keep a clear difference between your Personal Life & Professional Life, which when combined would make up your Society Image, which means a lot in today’s era. Make sure your privacy settings & security settings are appropriately set.
3. You need to showcase your skills & strengths, but not by speaking out loud that you have them. You need to highlight them through you daily activities, about which you should post through Videos, Photos, Text (in that order of preference).
4. Identify key groups which are related to your career, interests, skills, locality, future plans etc and interact with the members, showcasing your skills & strengths to them.
5. Expand your activities beyond Facebook to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Pintrest, Vimeo, Tumblr, Periscope / Meerkat, Quora, Feedly, Medium etc.
6. Use Appropriate Profile Photo & Cover Photo to give a better first impression. Remember profile photograph is for people to recognize you by your face, hence an appropriate Profile Photograph should be from Head to the torso. Whereas a cover photo should depict your strengths, skills, your work, your achievements etc. in-short, speaking the best about you.
7. When you share a post, it is referred to as Talking. On Social Media apart from Talking you need to Listen (read / see what others are posting), Interact (engage in constructive discussions), Support (be a part of good initiatives by others), Energize (keep growing your audience), Analyze (observe how your audience reacts to your activity) and Keep going on and on..
8. Lastly be Punctual with your posts, keep enough time gap between your posts, don’t post too much i.e. bombard your audience with too much content, don’t brag, keep proper security levels, connect with people who you know and who you can learn from. Remember, numbers only matter when they are from proper targeted audience.

Cheers! and Have a very Socially Effective Year in 2016 – YC