13 innovative ways to effectively use social media as a Product Manager
By: Sandeep Chadda
Tags: Resources, Product Management, Twitter, LinkedIn, Product Design

If you are a product manager and still contemplating having a social media presence for work, then you are just blog away to make an impact. My intent is that at the end of this post, you find few effective ways to make the most out of your social media presence.

All of what I write is based on my personal experience and use of twitter and LinkedIn.

The underlying need to be on social media is to serve the community and learn from it.

1. Find a community

Step 1 for social media for product management is finding the right communities that you wish to serve or learn from. You can subscribe to various relevant communities that could constitute your potential customers or interests. Find communities that can help you learn or share relevant and meaningful content.

2. Validate your hypothesis

Once you have a community of your target segment identified, you could collaborate effectively in various stages of product management. E.g. As a product manager, you always want to try out new ideas. But as we all know, the development cost for new ideas is expensive. Therefore, you can consider sharing UX mock ups for some crazy ideas on social media. That ways you can get some validation of your ideas at early stages of product building and accordingly shunt some of your crazy ideas or actually build some of your ideas into real product features.

3. Recruit users for research

You can use social media to validate your problem hypothesis with a particular persona.

If you have a particular persona in your mind while building your product features, you can reach out to your community and recruit the desired members who fit the user persona to interview them. You can perform research with these members to better understand their perspective and validate your hypothesis to build better products.

4. Evangelize

Use social media to advertise the latest product capabilities on social media so that you can drive adoption and get qualitative feedback on the product capabilities. This will also help you to grow a base of early adopters for your product. If you know your users well, then you can make magic.. not products :)

5. Seek feedback

Social media is the best platform to get early qualitative feedback from users and non-users for your product. You may get both positive feedback and areas of improvement. The most important thing is to follow up on any actionable feedback to ensure your user base stays engaged and you can show that you genuinely care.

6. Find early adopters

You can even use social media to give an early preview of some of your features in case you are looking for beta testers. It always helps to iron out your features by getting some early feedback for your product capabilities before rolling out to production.

7. Make personal connects

You may want to use social media to make a personal connect with your audience. Audience always loves a little bit of human behind the product manager :) Let your audience know what you are passionate about since passion is contagious.

8. Build your personal brand

Once you have a following, let your audience know where you are and how they can meet you. You would be surprised to know the impact you may be making in the community. Remember, the intent is always to find ways to serve others and if you think you can help others, then there is always a good reason for others to meet you.

9. Appreciate others

Don’t forget to take time to appreciate others who took time to touch move and inspire you.

10. Write

Write about what you may have learnt with the intent to offer help to others. I strongly believe that writing is the best form of learning and helping others learn.

11. Learn

If you are subscribed to the right audience, channels, and communities you may shorten your learning curve for new technologies and also stay up to date with the latest and greatest in the space you care about.

12. Find a mentor

LinkedIn could help you find some great mentors if you are looking for professional guidance. My previous blog on how to find a good mentor on LinkedIn.

13. Stay disciplined

While social media can be effective for all the above reasons, it can be a great distraction. Here are some do’s and don’ts if you plan to get active on twitter, LinkedIn, or other such platforms.

Restrict the time you spend on social media. You can time bound your presence on social media to best utilize your time e.g. 10 minutes after lunch, 10 minutes during morning travel, or while you are attending an event etc. Do not get enticed to look for likes, claps, views, engagements. These are a great time killer and their impact in the near term or long term is insignificant. Kudos to you if you got a viral tweet going or you are becoming an influencer on LinkedIn. But these are byproducts of what you do on social media. DO NOT get hooked to these numbers. Do not write content that distances you from your users. Stay away from polarized discussions, controversial topics, anything that may hurt the sentiments of your communities. Stick to quality and not quantity. Don’t feel compelled to post online. Clearly, declare that you belong to a particular organization so that the audience can clearly understand your motivation behind your posts.

To conclude,

The underlying need to be on social media is to serve the community and learn from it.

Would love to hear your feedback on using social media as a product manager.