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How Self-Employed Contractors Can Benefit From Social Media

By: Paul Towndrow

Posted On: Mar 28th, 2011  Under: Contractor Jobs, Freelance Contractors, Sole Trader

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Although based on a survey of larger companies than that of the average self-employed individual, there are plenty of valuable tips to be gleaned by the jobbing freelance contractor from Gartner’s new social media report.

Gartner took 10 months to complete the study and investigated 200 highly successful social media tactics used by these companies.  The results may be especially useful to those contractors who have not yet managed to acquire a steady stream of work.  The terminology in the report takes a little decoding from its original technobabble but, once rendered into plain English, it makes for interesting reading.  Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, it turns out, are valuable means of sourcing work and striking up rapports with potential clients.

For example, using social media accounts intelligently can help contractors detect emerging patterns in their field of expertise, which they might not otherwise have been aware about.  In Gartner’s technospeak, this is called “unearthing emergent structures” but it basically boils down to closely following and pulling together general feedback, comments and contributions from individuals.  Analysing this material can yield important insights into the freelancer’s client market.

Freelance contractors will need to identify their target market, and then get active, producing microblogs, sharing thoughts and sending amusing posts on a regular basis.  People start to gather around areas of common interest, and freelancers can be noticed by contributing in this area which really stand out (in Gartner-speak, it is called “creating interest cultivation”).  Once freelancers achieve a degree of awareness of their expertise in social media, they stand to benefit from requests by those following the comments and posts to hire it out - a phenomenon Gartner calls “building relationship leverage.”

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