Five Ways You Can Use Social Media For Your International Expatriate Career
If you are considering an international career or are living and working internationally right now as an expatriate, this article explores how you can use social media to enhance your professional reputation and includes:
- Decide which social media will work for you
- Demonstrate your digital competency
- Build your local culture-specific brand
- Develop your network
- Review, improve and iterate
Social media and online platforms have provided expats with a huge range of ways to keep in contact with loved ones all over the world – but have you thought about how you could use social media for your international career as an expatriate?
Serial expats know that it is important to maintain relationships and build global networks. Social media provides a perfect platform for building new relationships, keeping people posted on what you are doing and expanding opportunities for you, both now and in the future.
Before you embark on your expat journey (or even if you are on one now), it is a great idea to complete a ‘stocktake’ of what you have to offer.
One of the best platforms for this process is LinkedIn as it allows you to showcase what you have been doing up until now with specific sections for your experience, education and projects.
However, other social media can also be useful, particularly if what you do is more visual in nature. So let’s look at five ways you can use social media for your international career.
1. Decide which social media will work for you
My personal view is that everyone should have a LinkedIn Profile, a Google Personal Profile and their own name website (because you can control and keep everything on your own website and it is completely portable and is also indexed by generative AI and the content is added to AI’s dataset)!
However, social media platforms are regularly checked by decision makers, so if you have a profile there (e.g. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, X / Twitter, YouTube), you may wish to change your privacy settings and/or remove those personal ‘what I embarrassingly did when I was younger’ photos.
Personally, I do not post photos of my children and I assume that everything I post is public (even with security settings) because someone may know someone who can gain access. In fact, my overall motto for anything online is
”friendly, professional and solution-focused – not personal.”
Your Google About Section allows you to add online Links, Profile Links and Contributor Links to the ‘back end’ of Google and essentially tells Google what content to index in search results about you! I have used this section to prepare a list of links where my client had ‘good’ stories about them published online and added them in so that the ‘bad’ content dropped to page 2 of Google Search results (figuratively known as where to hide a dead body as nobody looks there)!
I have all the links to my online content in my own spreadsheet so that if Google removes this feature, I don’t lose all my links – and of course I have also added publications I have been in to my own name website list of publications).
Instagram can be good for visual storytelling (images or video) and can give people an insight in to who you are as a person.
Facebook, whilst less popular for sharing news but very popular for messaging services, still has a significant share of online traffic, particularly for older relatives who like to know what everyone is up to.
LinkedIn is my favourite (of course) because it is the world’s largest professional network, has clear do’s and don’ts, as well as professional community policies, and allows you to build and maintain your network (the most valuable asset you have apart from your skills), publish in a newsfeed and publish articles (like this one) as your own blog.
X / Twitter can help you appear in online search results as every tweet is instantly added to Google Search results. By posting three times a week in X, you can gain significant screen real estate when people search for your name.
TikTok is probably not the ideal platform for an international career expat and I would suggest limiting any content you share there to what you would be happy to share on more traditional platforms that ‘everyone’ can see.
YouTube is owned by Google so it can be a very good platform for showcasing your video content filmed in landscape and portrait mode. YouTube Video Shorts need to be filmed in portrait mode for less than three minutes. Longer portrait videos will display as landscape when you upload them to YouTube. Consider filming your public and non-commercially sensitive presentations and putting snippets online.
Note to self, create my own video show reel!
Individual countries also have some specific platforms – WeChat / Weixin in China, Xing in Germany, Viadeo in France, WhatsApp in India etc so watch out for those as well or check with your local colleagues for any other local social media.
2. Demonstrate your digital competency
Digital literacy involves filling in boxes. Digital competency means filling in all the boxes with the most relevant information for your purpose, adjusting the various settings, supporting the latest features and being an active participant in an efficient way (not falling in to the time-wasting vortex).
If you think that sounds like a lot of work, it can be! Ideally, you need to understand how the platform can benefit your career and focus on that specific activity rather than trying to be all things to all people.
Will adding YouTube videos to your LinkedIn Profile showcase your interests and achievements? Do you have consistent descriptions and profile information across your various social media platforms? Are you keeping your information up to date (and changing your location each time you move)? Do you have a list of all of your passwords in a password protected Excel spreadsheet because you are likely to have a lot of passwords over time? Are you logging in once a week or so and participating in a way that will help your career?
How do you use two factor / multi-factor authentication? It may be more appropriate to use a mobile phone application (app) rather than your telephone number as you may lose access to your phone when changing countries and then lose access to your account (this happened to a client of mine who lost access to their entire Google account as they couldn’t be verified when they moved back to Australia).
3. Build your local culture-specific brand
The reality is that different countries have different expectations. Your photos of jewellery on bare skin on Instagram may be completely inappropriate for viewing in a Middle Eastern country. The way you describe your achievements on LinkedIn in the USA is quite different to how you would describe them in Australia.
This means that you need to keep a personal copy of the content you have on your social media profiles (all platforms allow you to download your data archive or backup your data to your own device) and then when you move, consider updating the content for the local audience, especially if you are going to be working there and your new colleagues will be checking you out online (save the new copy as well). It is still a good idea to showcase your transferable skills and your achievements, but the way you do this may be slightly different for each location.
Have a look at the profiles of other local professionals and see how they engage on social media – both through their profile and their online activity. It might be a good idea to ‘lurk’ for a while and just ‘like’ or ‘comment’ rather than produce content. This will also be good for building your engagement ratio, the number of times you engage rather than simply broadcast information.
In fact, nowadays, most social media platforms don’t want you to just ‘post and ghost,’ they want you to engage and create conversations. In fact, LinkedIn tracks this via the Weekly Sharing Tracker and every Monday, starts the clock again.
4. Develop your network
You may think that your priority when you move to a new location should be researching and finding new people to add to your network, but it is also very important to maintain relationships with your existing network, especially if you may repatriate or return to a previous location (for work or travel).
By tagging (typing @ before their name or social media handle) people in your posts, it will send a notification that you have referenced them and it can keep your relationship alive (but please do not do this just to increase distribution).
Keep following and adding new connections over time and build up your global audience as you never know what this may lead to in the future. I aim to connect with at least three people whenever I go to an in-person meeting and everyone I meet via email, text, phone call, direct message online.
A Belgian client of mine was found in Sydney by a Belgian company via LinkedIn and secured a very lucrative short term contract because he had showcased his previous Belgian experience and this helped the company find him for a gig in Sydney.
5. Review, improve and iterate
Although many people have no idea how social media is performing beyond the number of followers or likes, there are a number of metrics that can give you clues as to what does and does not work. To succeed, you’ll also need to know the best techniques for identifying improvements and opportunities for your purpose and iterate along the way as new information comes to hand.
For example, social media influencers offer advertisers access to large numbers of followers – but advertisers will be wasting their advertising money if those followers do not engage with posts.
If you are not receiving the results you would like, what can you do to change the opportunities you are attracting? Do you need to review the keywords you are using in your online profiles, comments or posts? Do you need to focus on a niche or be more general in your approach? What have you learnt so far or who could you ask for more advice? Can you use social media to find the best person to speak to directly?
This article has been written personally by me (no AI involved) and discusses some of the general principles associated with using social media for your international career.
The photo of the Melbourne Airport International Departure Board is from 2018 and I have used it in this post as I remember standing underneath it and hearing the click click clicks every time it updated – a bit of semi-analogue technology we don’t hear nowadays!
Action Steps
1) Tips: If you have some tips you would like to share with others, please add them to this LinkedIn Article.
2) Questions: If you have some quick questions you would like to ask, please contact me directly via sueellson [at] sueellson.com
3) Professional Support: If you would like to book an appointment to prepare before you travel, settle once you arrive, review your current posting or plan your return, please book an appointment.
Shared online: Publications, Archive.org, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn Article, LinkedIn Page, LinkedIn Profile, X / Twitter