I‘m going to make a case for engaging in the world of social media and it’s one you may not have heard before. Understandably not everyone will use Facebook, MySpace or Twitter for work, and you may say that you don’t have time to use it at home. But, what you may not know is that engaging in social media can help build your self-confidence, which in turn will help you be more successful at work and happier at home.
Learn to not care what other people say about you. The online world is full of rejection if you think about it. Not getting your Facebook friend request accepted, losing Twitter followers, getting a nasty response from a blog comment. But, the truth is that the more of yourself you put out there, the less you will start to care. Because you already have tons of Facebook friends, you are winning new Twitter followers everyday and you can’t let one bad egg on a blog get to you.
Accepting credit. There’s no room for the humble online! You will have people tell you in public that they saw your website and blog and loved it. You will have folks on Twitter retweeting and recommending you to all their followers. Be gracious and accept that you made a useful contribution. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Become an authority. When you’re blogging or building a brand for yourself on Twitter or other social media platforms, if you don’t present yourself as an authority, you will remain one in a million social media users. On the contrary, it takes a lot of guts to write about advice, give your opinion or try to be funny. You need to trust that you are a credible enough source to do this. If believe it, then your readers will too.
Using social media to build self confidence will have a lasting ripple effect that will trickle down through home and work alike. It may be uncomfortable at first to “put yourself out there,” but if you have something to say, then you will eventually feel right at home in the world of social media.
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