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When Your Phone Is Your Business: Growth Tips For Influencers And Media Professionals

In this time of remote working, eCommerce, and social media, your smartphone can easily be your most-used business tool.

By Denise LangeneggerPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Image credit: Wallpaper Flare

Since time immemorial, humans have followed various mealtime rituals, with restrictions put into place to maximize harmony and allow families to bond. There’s the complicated world of etiquette, of course, which varies based on your surroundings: depending on the region you’re in, you may be considered rude for eating too noisily or eating too quietly. For many families, though, recent years have encouraged one core rule: no phones at the dining table.

That’s easy enough to understand, isn’t it? So many of us, regardless of age, are lulled into near-silence by the flashing updates our phones deliver on a steady basis. But things really aren’t so simple. The smartphones to which we’re so attached aren’t just frivolous distractions. They allow us to cultivate and maintain friendships, hone our skills, plan our lives, and — perhaps most importantly — do business.

In this time of remote working, eCommerce, and social media, your smartphone can easily be your most-used business tool. Social influencers and media professionals alike need to spend hours each day on their phones, and that’s just to keep up. What if they want to grow their operations to make more money and earn more acclaim? Let’s take a look at some tips aimed at those who’d be utterly lost professionally without their smartphones.

Assemble a workable desktop environment

The modern smartphone is a technological wonder. It can provide you with high-speed internet access almost wherever you go, capably handle ultra-high-definition video, process numerous core tasks simultaneously, and allow you to take your work with you. But it’s far from perfect as an overall business solution — and the problem is the design.

Your smartphone wasn’t built to be the hub of your business activity. It was built for occasional use and light swiping. A workday might require you to stare at a screen for hours on end, and that’s made markedly tougher when that screen is the size of your palm. So what are you to do when a proliferation of mobile-exclusive apps are your bread and butter?

Well, you can set up a desktop office space that uses your phone as the processor. You can have all the trimmings of a typical layout (a big display, a mouse, a keyboard, a headset) but with your phone instead of a laptop or desktop computer. How you can go about this depends on your device. Though an MHL cable to extend the display may be the most you can do for your smartphone, it’s becoming increasingly common for mobile operating systems to have broad desktop extensions. Look at something like Samsung’s DeX as an example.

Either way, you can use a USB hub to connect all your peripherals and have a much more comfortable working experience while you’re at home. And when you need to go, you can simply unplug your smartphone and leave. It’s that simple.

Take advantage of social media aggregators

Social media aggregators make your life simple. However, you still have to use social media to grow your business.

The good news is that you don’t really have to be on every single social media platform, posting all day long. Not all social platforms (and hence the time you’ll have to spend on them) are built the same.

You really need a way to optimize the time, energy, and resources you spend on social media. Here’s a way to boost social media reach and go social on steroids. When you are on social, it’s critical that you focus only on social platforms that work for your business.

More importantly, inspire, engage, be yourself, help others, and build relationships.

Keeping up with all the latest news from just one social media channel can be difficult enough, with a seemingly-endless flow of updates coming in from all over the world. So what if you need to follow updates for something in particular — maybe a product you’re selling or a brand you’re building — from all viable channels? Trying to do this manually is a recipe for disaster.

That’s where social media aggregation tools enter the picture. The idea is simple: instead of flitting between apps, you can have just one app filter out the most relevant posts from all channels and copy them into a single feed that’s easy to follow. You can also use them to post on numerous platforms at the same time, saving you a lot of effort.

Pro Tip: You can also use social media to provide exceptional customer service and grow your business.

If you’re interested, take a look at this list of tools from SocialMediaToday and read up on some relevant reviews to see how they fare. Since free trials are standard, you don’t have much to lose by testing out several options, and you can then make a greater commitment to whichever tool best suits your preferences and intentions (don’t be surprised if it’s Hootsuite).

Put time into supporting other professionals

You’re ultimately in business to serve your own purposes (with making money being the top priority for most), but that doesn’t mean that your social activity should be non-stop self-promotion. That’s actually likely to work against you. You’ll seem self-absorbed and oblivious to how you come across, sullying your personal brand.

Instead, you should put a fair amount of time into supporting other professionals in your field (or adjacent to it). When you find great content, endorse it with full attribution and pass your followers along. When someone makes an excellent point, highlight it for your audience. This will achieve two good things for you: firstly, it’ll lessen the strain on your creativity (producing original posts all the time can be exhausting), and secondly, you’ll seem altruistic.

The more you help other people get exposure for their brands, the more people will want to support your brand, making it an inarguable win for everyone involved.

Schedule downtime for the sake of your health

Lastly, it bears noting that the convenience of the smartphone format often results in overuse. Dwelling at a typical desktop for a third of the day isn’t great, but at least you can easily move away from that situation for the rest of the day. When you work through your phone, you can spend the entire day looking at it. This is bad for your eyes, and bad for your mental health.

So regardless of how ambitious you are, you need to find room in your schedule to put the phone down and do something else. Take a long walk, read a book, or just sleep. Maybe take a vacation or even start a travel blog. This will allow you to stay relatively refreshed, meaning that you can perform at a higher level when the pressure is on and you really need to get things done.

Will it be difficult? Absolutely. Like most people, there’s a good chance that you’re almost attached to your phone by this point, habitually checking it every couple of minutes just in case someone has reached out to you. But it’s worth doing (like many practical steps). If you don’t take breaks, you might reach the point of burnout and never want to work through your phone again. That’s a problem that can damage your prospects in the long term.

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About the Creator

Denise Langenegger

Denise Langenegger is part of the team at Instasize – a content creating tool kit for anyone editing photos and online content on mobile.

Instagram: @instasize.official

Twitter: @Instasize

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