Social networking

Nov 06 2023
Corinne McKay

Where is social media headed?

If you’re an interpreter or an aspiring interpreter, this month’s master class is for you! On November 15, I’m teaching How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreting exam, a 90-minute webinar for anyone interested in creating a training plan for a court, conference, or medical exam. There’s also a bonus class this month: on November 16, I’m teaching Breaking into the book translation market for ProZ.com, but registration is open to anyone.

A participant in my online course alumni group recently asked what I thought was going to happen to Twitter/ X, which got me thinking about the changing social media landscape. So, let’s dive in: Where do I think that social media is headed?

In general, I’m someone who likes social media. I’m on Facebook and I enjoy using it to keep up with friends, plus it’s the main communication platform for the animal rescue group that my family volunteers for; I’m on Instagram for really no particular purpose except that I find it interesting. I mostly follow yoga and vegetarian cooking accounts, and I mostly post about travel and my foster cats. Like pretty much everyone else, I’m on LinkedIn, and I was, until recently, quite active on Twitter.

But, as tends to happen in the world, things are changing. I used to love Twitter as a “virtual watercooler,” and as a way to get real-time updates from news sites and local government entities (“Where is that smoke coming from?,” type of thing). When I met interesting people at conferences, I would typically connect with them on Twitter and possibly LinkedIn, but Twitter was my main social media outlet. That all changed in the last six months or so, and I noticed that the vast majority of my new Twitter followers appeared to be bots, or people with zero connection to translation or interpreting. I got fed up with this and decided to delete my Twitter accounts, which I did about a month ago. I hemmed and hawed about whether to just stop posting, but I decided I wanted nothing more to do with Twitter, and it’s actually been really liberating.

At the same time, I feel like Facebook, weirdly, is having a moment. I think that Facebook now (again, weirdly, considering some of Facebook’s history) seems like the more sedate, sane social media platform, and a lot more people seem to be using it for business. Believe it or not, I’m actually in the process of creating a business Facebook page to market my official document translation services.

The question is, with the downward slide on Twitter, (which, by various measures, has lost half to two-thirds of its value since the Elon Musk acquisition), what’s the alternative?? I actually asked this question on LinkedIn, and the answers were interesting. People said things like:

There isn’t really an alternative; Twitter’s real-time, short-form content isn’t happening anywhere else
Maybe try Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon
LinkedIn may become more Twitter-esque (people posting more frequently and including more lighthearted content) now that Twitter is X
Smaller communities like Discord servers may become more active
Even smaller communities like WhatsApp chat groups between you and a very specific group of colleagues may become more popular

Here’s my case for social media: despite all of its downsides and potential toxicity, social media is a really great way to stay connected. As a simple example on the personal side, when I ask people who aren’t on Facebook, “How do you stay in touch with peripheral friends: former coworkers, old neighbors, college roommates, etc.?” they mostly respond, “I don’t stay in touch with them.” And if you don’t want to stay in touch with those people, (or the professional equivalent: people you meet at conferences, people you work on projects with), no problem and you do you. I do enjoy those kinds of connections, and in a day and age where it’s become much less common to call someone just to talk, or to e-mail someone just to catch up, I enjoy that aspect of social media.

But, social media is undeniably changing, particularly with the Twitter-induced fragmentation. Here are a few phenomena I’ve observed lately:

People seem a little fed up with the superficial nature of social media; it can seem hard or even odd to put your struggles as well as your successes out there, and places like Discord servers or smaller chat groups seem more conducive to this.
My sense is that LinkedIn is gaining traction, but/and LinkedIn has never been truly welcoming to freelancers. Witness the fact that when you write someone a LinkedIn recommendation, there is no option for, “I worked with this person as a fellow freelancer,” and instead you’re presented with options like “We worked together in the same group,” or “I managed this person.”
People with online businesses seem to be realizing that you don’t own your social media audience, and social media platforms are zero help if you get hacked, even if you have millions of followers. There are times when I feel a bit outdated because I mainly communicate with my Training for Translators audience through e-mail (currently 4,000 subscribers) and my blog (about 5,000 views a month). But then, I see debacles where people with (literally) millions of social media followers are hacked, or locked out of their accounts. Plus, the social media platform’s entire business model is that you have no way to contact your subscribers off-platform. This makes me even less inclined to cultivate a large following on social media.

I feel that we have yet to see a true successor to Twitter, and I really miss the community of translators and interpreters that once existed there. At the same time, I’m enjoying the more personal groups that I’ve started to be a part of, and I’m enjoying LinkedIn more, posting more often there, and posting some “not strictly business” things (I’ve started adding photos of my foster cats to my Training for Translators posts!).

If you have thoughts on the new social media landscape, feel free to add a comment!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!

Oct 13 2016
Corinne McKay

LinkedIn connections: what’s your strategy?

One of my goals for this quarter is to make better use of LinkedIn; I feel like it’s an underutilized tool for freelancers, and I want to explore its usefulness for my own purposes and for some students who’ve asked me about it. But here’s a fundamental question about your LinkedIn presence: how do you decide whose connection requests to accept or ignore?

Back in the day (let’s say before 2014 or so), my rule for LinkedIn connection requests was fairly rigid and fairly straightforward: if I don’t know you, and you don’t write a personal message saying how you know me, I don’t accept your request. My feeling was that there was little value in being connected to complete strangers on LinkedIn. Then, things changed in a few ways. Most problematically, LinkedIn now makes it harder to send a personal message (in place of the standard “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”), even if you want to. For example if you simply click on a connection that LinkedIn suggests, your connection request is automatically sent; you have to first click through to the person’s profile if you want to send a personal message along with your request.

As a result, I’ve relaxed my strategy over the years. I now accept most requests from people who already have a number of shared connections with me, and who work in the T&I industry in some capacity. On the positive side, I actually enjoy the status updates feature of the LinkedIn home page (where you can see what your connections have recently posted), and the updates are a lot more interesting when you have a lot of connections. The downside is that I’ve now amassed over 1,500 LinkedIn connections, many (or even most) of them to people who I know nothing about, except that they seem to be translators or interpreters and sent me a connection request. This gets problematic when I get an introduction request from someone else (“Can you refer me to this person?”), or a request for information about one of my connections (“What’s this person like to work with?”).

So, I feel like I’m in a bit of LinkedIn limbo: I don’t see the appeal of the LION (LinkedIn open networker) strategy, but I also feel that the days of restricting one’s LinkedIn network only to people with whom one has a personal connection are probably over. Any other thoughts on the pluses and minuses of this?

Aug 28 2014
Corinne McKay

Handling LinkedIn connection requests

I often refer to LinkedIn as the most underused social media resource out there: most of us have a LinkedIn profile, but we just “set it and forget it,” rather than using the site’s more sophisticated capabilities. At the very least, LinkedIn is a great way to connect with people in your target industries, by joining Groups that they also belong to (direct client 101: you don’t find them if you only hang out with other translators). You can also use LinkedIn saved searches–even with the free account–to keep track of business prospects. You can use LinkedIn like a virtual Rolodex so that you’re not scrabbling through your desk drawer for the business card of someone you met at a conference five years ago. LinkedIn is also really useful for doing research about your potential clients: finding out who’s hiring, who changed jobs, and so on.

But first, you have to contend with the sticky issue of how to handle LinkedIn connection requests. When I first joined LinkedIn, I was pretty liberal about who I connected with, theorizing that anyone who worked in our industry was potentially a good connection. Over the years (and many hundreds of connections later), I’ve become less of an “open networker,” so I only accept connection requests from a) people I know or b) people who personalize their connection request message and explain how we know each other or why they want to connect with me. If I don’t know the person outside LinkedIn and they don’t explain why they want to connect, I hit “Ignore” and then “I don’t know John Doe,” because I see little value in these types of blind connections.

“But LinkedIn just sends the connection request automatically!,” I hear you cry…”It’s gone before I can personalize it!” Well, not if you do it the right way. Yes, if you’re just looking at LinkedIn’s list of “People You May Know,” and you click the “Connect” button, there goes the invitation with the stock message “I’d like to add you as a connection on LinkedIn.” However if you are looking at the profile of the person you want to connect with, and then you click Connect, you’ll get this popup:

Then, you can indicate how you know the person, and you can write them a personal message. Everyone has to come up with their own LinkedIn strategy: some people will connect only with people they personally know and work with, while others are open to networking with anyone who hits the Connect button. But personalizing your connection request looks more professional and will undoubtedly result in a greater success rate than mass-connecting anonymously.

Feb 11 2011
Corinne McKay

Reader question: LinkedIn strategies

Recently I’ve received several questions from readers about connecting with people on LinkedIn. Most of the questions are something like this: “I receive connection requests from people I don’t know at all, with no explanation of who they are or how I might know them. Is it rude/unwise to just ignore these?” This brings up the issue of one’s personal LinkedIn strategy, so I think it’s worth exploring.

I don’t invest an enormous amount of time on LinkedIn, but I do think that for purposes of findability, every freelancer should have a profile on LinkedIn or a similar site. These sites rank very highly on search engines, so if clients are scouring the Internet for a translator, there’s a good chance that they will come across your LinkedIn profile. In addition, I use LinkedIn as a virtual business card file; it saves me from keeping track of the e-mail addresses of all of my business contacts. I also belong to several LinkedIn groups; I lurk more than I participate, but I still find them valuable.

People seem to have a variety of feelings about LinkedIn connections, ranging from:

only wanting to connect with people who they know personally and work with, resulting in a potentially small but very high-quality network
being willing to connect with new people, if those people provide an explanation of why they want to connect
actively connecting with anyone, also known as the LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) strategy

I can see rationales for all of these strategies, but in general I think I take the second option most often. One reason I’m an active social media user is that my local client base is very small. Colorado is not as international business-oriented as the coastal states in the U.S., and the major industries here (mining, agriculture, renewable energy) are not areas in which I translate. So, I have to broaden my horizons if I want to keep finding new clients. For that reason, I’ve done some active cold-contacting on LinkedIn, mostly in the form of sending contact requests to people who are in some of the same LinkedIn Groups I’m in (with a free account, you cannot cold-contact just anyone on LinkedIn). I’ve explained that I’m a US-based French to English translator specializing in law, international development and corporate communications and that I’m interested in expanding my contacts in that person’s country/industry. In general I’ve found people to be very receptive to these types of contacts. At the same time, I am reluctant to accept contact requests from people whose names I don’t recognize, and who provide no explanation beyond the pro forma “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” message.

Readers, any thoughts on your LinkedIn strategy and your rationale for it?