Social media for Software developers and IT geeks in 2022

A lot of IT people use blogs to store tricks and tips and to share knowledge and reviews with others.

We started many years ago with blogs now we have multiple platforms where to share our content.

In this post, I will try to share my experience with these media platforms from a developer’s point of view.

The question I try to answer is how social media can benefit us as developers.

Blogs

In my opinion blogs are the best knowledge-sharing platform for developers and IT passionate. I think it is still the preferred destination when developers look for solutions and tutorials (besides S.O.).

Advantages

• they are easy to create (WordPress etc.), to update and to maintain
• you can add text, images and videos
• search engines scan your text and they reference it without much intervention from your side
• readers can ‘subscribe’ with mailing lists or other newsfeed tools
• free choice of the format: one or more columns, small or big images
• they will stay on the web forever

Disadvantages

• your website will compete with millions of other sites, you have to learn a bit of S.E.O to stand out of the crowd
• people don’t easily subscribe to a mailing list and don’t read them
• you have to combine your communication strategies with other platforms (Twitter etc.)
• you need to integrate your website with other tools (e.g. analytics, comments, etc.)

Twitter

Twitter is more and more a platform for short announcements or for ‘ask for action’ in a community. Your post will be visible only a few seconds in the news stream of the users.

Usage

• share some news with the community
• ask opinions to the community

Advantages

• quick interaction
• easy to create a new twit
• It’s the preferred platform by developers

Disadvantages

• your communication will have a short span of life/attention (from a few seconds to a few hours)
• the ‘discussion’ features are pretty limited compared to other platforms

Instagram

Instagram is very flexible and for this reason pretty complex. You can publish in multiple formats and it’s mainly image-oriented.

Usage

• small videos and graphics creations
• news and announcements

Advantages

• flexible (video formats, type of communication)
• growing community
• your posts can have a long lifespan
• the ‘discussion panel’ connected to a post is good compared to other platforms

Disadvantages

• complex (video formats, type of communication)
• the developer's community is not there (yet?!)
• you have to attract attention more visually than with text content

TikTok

At the moment, for Developers, I don’t see a lot of meaning to invest too much time in this platform, but you could be the unicorn that finds a magic formula to monetize with this platform. An Excel teacher succeeded to earn millions of dollars thanks to TikTok. It’s very oriented to very short video sketches and you should combine dance and synthesis skills to succeed.

Summary