Social Media for Professionals | Nelson Croom | Professional Development Portfolio |

Social media is a powerful tool for supporting your professional activities. It can help you build networks, enhance organisational processes and work practices and boost your personal career development.

If you’ve ever wanted to exploit the power of social media but didn’t know where to start, this course is for you. You’ll consider how social media can help you achieve your own professional goals, explore some of the most common social media platforms and discover how other organisations and individuals use social media in a professional context. You’ll develop your own personal social media brand, start to build an online professional network and discover diverse new sources of specialist information. Finally, you’ll consider how social media can be used for marketing, organising events or managing collaborative and remote-working projects.

Throughout, you’ll access targeted information delivered across a range of blogs and social networks.

Social Media for Professionals is part of Nelson Croom's Issues and Debates suite of learning. Issues and Debates courses stimulate intelligent dialogue and debate and provide a valuable and evolving resource of professional knowledge and experience. These courses are topical, practical and highly relevant to today's changing market. Each module is split into two activities: Understanding the issues and Putting it into practice. The first encourages you to think about a topic, drawing on your own professional experience and knowledge. The second helps you to put ideas and/or theories into practice as part of your day-to-day work.

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Social Media for Professionals enables the learner to:

Define your own professional goals in using social media
Identify the most personally relevant social media platforms and tools
Appreciate the importance of social media etiquette and appropriate privacy settings
Use social media to stay up-to-date
Develop your personal social media brand
Build an online professional network
Monitor the effectiveness of your social media activity
Avoid information overload
Integrate social media as a tool within your wider organisational practices

Learning outcomes

Introducing social media and social networking

Web 2.0 and the semantic web

Social media as a concept

Social media platforms

Social networking

Privacy and openness

Social media and you

Using social media for business

Defining your goals

Choosing your platforms

Presenting yourself

Setting up your network

Staying informed

Using social media to keep up-to-date

Following blogs

Joining groups

Using social media clients

Avoiding information overload

Building relationships

Using social media to spark new relationships

Social media etiquette

Virtual vs. real world networking

Monitoring success

Building your personal brand

Extreme social media

Social media for marketing

Social media projects

Social media events

Physical tracking

Virtual worlds

Target audience

This course is aimed at professionals who want to integrate social media into any level of their work life.

About the Author

Anna Faherty is a writer, lecturer and consultant working across the publishing, museum and charity sectors. She has hands-on management experience as director of a multi-million pound publishing division and is currently on the board of a small independent museum.