PROCEDIMIENTO ELABORACIÓN DEL ANTEPROYECTO DE PRESUPUESTO ANUAL Y MULTIANUAL

Another growing area of promotion is social media, and the exploitation of social networking tools such as Facebook (www.facebook.com), Twitter (www.twitter.com) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) to allow people and practices to interact more directly with potential clients and to promote

their business. The RIBA also has its own professional networking platform, the RIBA Knowledge Communities (www.riba-knowledgecommunities.com), which provides spaces to collaborate, interact and build connections with built environment professionals.

linkedIn

LinkedIn is the principal medium for professional networking and a mobile version of the site is now available. Other than giving you the opportunity of connecting with your contacts’ contacts (‘second-degree’ connections) and their contacts (‘third-degree’ connections) and so on – which can be used to gain an introduction to someone you wish to know through a mutual contact – it also gives people a means to keep in touch with you should your email address change when you change jobs. There are currently more than 225 million users, with 11 million of those in the UK. Users can invite anyone to become a connection, whether they are an existing user or not. It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in your contact network. Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates, and jobseekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them. Users can post their own photos and view photos of others to aid in identification. The ‘gated-access’ approach – where contact with any professional requires either an existing relationship or the intervention of a contact of theirs – is intended to build trust among the service’s users.

LinkedIn also supports the formation of interest groups and now has over a million, although they can be subject to spam postings. Groups can be private and accessible to members only, or they can be open to anyone to read, with only membership necessary to post messages.

LinkedIn allows users to research companies with which they may be interested in working and to endorse their connections’ skills – which can also be a means of catching the attention of someone you haven’t contacted for a while.

A premium subscription is available, with a range of benefits according to the fee paid.

You can select who can see your connections, but by default your first- degree connections can see your list of connections. This lets them browse your network and find mutual friends and colleagues. A ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’ feature helps you understand who has been looking at your profile in the past 90 days, how many times you have shown up in search results, and other such information.

You can select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile and there are three different ways to see who’s viewed your profile, based on the profile viewer’s privacy settings:

• display viewer’s name, headline, location and industry;

• display only anonymous profile characteristics, such as job title, company, school and industry; or

• display as an anonymous LinkedIn member. This reflects members who have viewed your profile and chose to remain anonymous.

You can also see trends regarding the people who have viewed your profile. The trends you see depend on whether you have a free or premium account. If one of your goals on LinkedIn is to increase your visibility, this feature can significantly increase the likelihood that your profile will be discovered and viewed by other members. You do also have the option to remove the box from your profile.

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages of up to 140 characters, known as ‘tweets’. It has over 500 million registered users, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries a day. Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can subscribe to other users’ tweets – known as following. As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. Users can group posts together by topic or type by using ‘hashtags’ – words or phrases prefixed with a ‘#’ sign. Similarly, the ‘@’ sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one’s own followers, the retweet function is symbolised by ‘RT’ in the message.

A word, phrase or topic that is tagged at a greater rate than other tags is said to be a trending topic. Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users or because of an event that prompts people to talk about one specific topic.

As with any form of social media you must know what you want to achieve by using it. If you want to attract followers and keep them interested, tweets should be entertaining, or at least informative. In this way you can, if you work at it, develop a group of people who are aware of you and what you are interested in. Your tweets should be professional in nature and reflect your business persona, not your private one. If you do use it for business purposes, make sure it is delivering value for the time you spend on it.

Facebook

Facebook is perhaps the least useful of the three for business use but, as with Twitter, it is important that if you do use it you make regular postings. There are a number of websites that offer advice on how to optimise your business Facebook page, which can be found by searching ‘Facebook for business’.

Blogging

Many architect’s websites have blogging pages, which can be used to provide up-to-date news on what the practice is doing, awards received, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and so on. As with all social media, it must be attended to and updated regularly.