The Social Platform Designers Need to Be On

Hint: It's not Instagram.

May 21, 2023

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This time last year nobody knew who I was.

I was a partner at a well-known industrial design firm behind products that had become household names. I had been designing hardware for over ten years, and had over a dozen design awards and 19 design patents to my name.

A lot of people knew the products I had worked on. A few people knew my company’s name. But nobody knew me.

Like many designers, I felt that the work spoke for itself, so I never bothered to promote myself much. For the last 6 years I didn’t even have a portfolio website.

A decade into my design journey, I finally realized that the strength of your personal brand (which is something you have whether you actively work on it or not) can have a profound influence on the opportunities available to you and the trajectory of your career.

Around this time last year, I also left my design firm to pursue an independent path. Without the company name, it was even more critical that people start to know who I was.

So I decided to start putting my name out into the world, and the easiest way for most people to do that is through social media.

Now, we’re probably all on social media to some extent in a personal capacity so you might be wondering how getting more likes and follows can help you grow your career.

The answer is simple: we are all human, and we have a strong preference to work with and do business with people we know, like, and trust.

So the point of a professional social media presence is to get people to know, like, and trust you.

If you consistently show up in people’s social media feeds and people start to recognize who you are and what you’re about, trust starts to form naturally and you will have a huge leg up if you ever interact with them professionally.

Having a strong professional social media presence can help you get your next job, new clients, or other professional development opportunities like speaking gigs, podcast interviews, and more.

It’s not a game of vanity metrics like likes and follows. It’s marketing.

Everything I had read about growing an online presence told me to focus on one platform at first. So I was faced with a choice: which one?

Many designers would jump to Instagram. It’s the obvious one. We’re visual people and Instagram is a highly visual platform.

But Instagram’s strength is also its weakness.

In a feed of images, design work becomes highly commodified. It all starts to look the same after a while, and rarely does it lead to some deeper connection. Think about your own Instagram habits. I’ll bet its mostly casually scrolling and liking rather than going deep on what a designer is about. I can’t name one designer I remember from Instagram aside from the big name firms that I follow.

Additionally, Instagram is a very noisy place. You might see some cool design work, but it’s probably nested between a bunch of dog pictures, your friend’s sushi date last night, and random thirst traps. With Instagram’s push into short-form video to compete with TikTok, it’s noisier than its ever been.

What about Twitter?

I was actually quite active in a small industrial design Twitter sphere a decade ago. But there seemed to be little to no industrial design activity on Twitter anymore when I looked last year, and its again a platform with a lot of noise, so I ruled that out.

On the advice of my brother, who runs his own small social media marketing company, I settled on what was at the time (and maybe still is) a non-obvious choice: LinkedIn.

LinkedIn? That weird site where people put their resumes online and share their job updates once every two years?

Yes. LinkedIn.

If you haven’t been there recently, LinkedIn has become the Facebook of work. It’s now a content-rich platform where professionals are engaging with each other every day. If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s probably how you found me.

LinkedIn has a lot of things going for it. For me, as someone looking to use social media to grow my career and market my business, its professional framing is it’s biggest benefit.

People aren’t there to post dog pics. They’re there to network and do business (and maybe to see the occasional dog pic from a colleague). So you’re going to have a lot more career and business focused interactions.

The fact that LinkedIn is seen as a work-related platform and is somewhat acceptable to be on at the office means that even CEOs and high-level executives are on there almost daily. Those people have the biggest sway over hiring and design partnerships, and since they’re probably not scrolling Instagram all day at work, you want to be where they already are.

Creating content for LinkedIn is also relatively low-effort. The most popular form of content on LinkedIn is text. Sure, you can venture into images, videos, and carousels, but the LinkedIn algorithm seems to primarily prefer text (or at least give it equal weight to richer content). This means you can write something in a few minutes and if it grips people it has the opportunity to spread to millions of viewers.

This also means that people start to engage with you based on your thoughts and ideas. They’re not just scrolling past and casually liking an image. They’re debating with you and adding to your thoughts. And over time your name and your way of thinking starts to stick. And when they need a designer or a podcast guest, that stickiness comes in real handy.

Over the last year I’ve gone all in on LinkedIn, posting almost every weekday. In that time my content has been seen over 4.2 million times. I’ve grown from 0 to 12,000+ followers, connected with lots of interesting people, signed new clients, reconnected with old clients, and was invited to speak at the leading conference for industrial designers, on podcasts, and even at a global Fortune 500 company.

But here’s the thing. It wasn’t that hard.

I spent on average less than an hour a day creating content and engaging with people on LinkedIn. And I started seeing benefits from my social media activity within a few weeks.

I did spend a lot of time studying content strategies and LinkedIn-specific knowledge, adapting it for designers, and making sure I was intentional with what I was doing. I’m putting it all together in a short course specific to designers so I can share it with you. Scroll down to learn more about that.

I firmly believe that growing a presence on LinkedIn is the best thing I’ve done for my career, and that every designer who wants to grow professionally and develop career capital that will benefit them for years to come should do the same.

Today’s issue of Design Things has a sponsor! It’s…me!

Who says I can’t sponsor my own newsletter?

I’ve learned and tried a lot of things on LinkedIn over the last year. A lot of the material and examples I learned from weren’t really specific to designers and I had to adapt it to my own uses.

I’m putting together a course where I share everything I’ve learned about growing on LinkedIn as a designer. I’ll teach you all the strategies I’ve used to grow an audience of over 12,000 followers and create content that generated 4.2 million+ impressions, which has allowed me to get new clients, connect with top professionals, and get speaking opportunities at conferences, on podcasts, and even at a global Fortune 500 company.

If you’re a designer that’s ready to start publishing on LinkedIn and increasing your professional surface area, click the button below to check it out.

The course launches on Sunday June 25th for $50, but for the next 30 days you can get it at a special pre-sale price of $25 at the link below.

Pre-order LinkedIn for Designers for $25

Design Things of the Week

Each week I share a few design-related things I’ve encountered.

✨Something for design nerds to watch tonight (free!).

Rams on Gary Hustwit’s Substack. It’s Dieter Rams’ birthday, and documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) is showing his film Rams for free on his website all weekend. I saw it a few years ago and loved it.

✈️ A crazy cool combination of ChatGPT, Google Maps, and Unreal Engine.

Nils Bakker’s LinkedIn post. This post shows just what’s possible if you take all the amazing emerging technological building blocks that are being developed these days and string them together in a creative way. You no longer have to code everything from scratch, you can take super powerful elements and just build the connecting tissue.

💬 A quote to think about

Tony Fadell did an AMA on Reddit this week. This was the first thing that caught my eye. Make time for the people you care about:

Reader Q&A

No questions this week. But if you have one, leave it in the comments below and I will answer in the next issue!

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Just the ID Jobs - 12x Full-Time, 5x Internships

“Just the Industrial Design Jobs” is a segment of this newsletter that lists only industrial design jobs that were posted within the last week to various job board websites. US based only for now for my sanity (sorry!).

Please let me know if you find this useful, and if it is I encourage you to share or forward it onto your industrial design friends.

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MilliporeSigma - Industrial Design Summer Intern

Burlington MA

Equipment

$22 - $26 an hour

1 years experience minimum

Design Things by Anson Cheung

The Social Platform Designers Need to Be On

Hint: It's not Instagram.

Design Things of the Week

Reader Q&A

What did you think of this email?

Just the ID Jobs - 12x Full-Time, 5x Internships

MilliporeSigma - Industrial Design Summer Intern

LifestyleDesign - ID Internship

Minimal - Industrial Design Intern

Feather Dynamics - CAD Intern

The Hillman Group - Industrial Design Intern

Logoplaste - Technical Packaging Designer

KidKraft - Industrial/Toy Designer

Schylling - Design Lead/Toy Designer

Product Creation Studio - Industrial Designer

Vermeer Corporation - Industrial Designer I

Gizmo Art Production - Designer

Blue Origin - Mockup Designer- Space Systems Development

Grafton Furniture - Industrial Designer

JANSON - Industrial Designer

Peloton - Industrial Designer IIII

Nutrafol - Retail & Packaging Designer (Contract)

Core Home - Freelance Packaging Designer

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