Social Media Scanning for Freelancing, Online, Upwork….

This fall, members of the Digital Work Group monitored social media to explore how online freelancers perceive and discuss their experiences.

Where do online freelancers learn new skills, build professional networks, connect with mentors, and get guidance on how to resolve problems with clients and coworkers? We know that online freelancers do not have access to the informal workplace interactions that many of us associate with being together at the office.

For decades, organizational leaders and career coaches have advocated that experiencing ‘workplace culture:’ — those norms and expectations that structure the ways offices work — helps workers develop workplace skills. These norms and expectations can range from expectations of timeliness and responses to emails to who is expected to refresh the coffee pot in the breakroom.

Many people who pursue online freelancing are looking for more flexibility than what is typically available with in-person work. These workers voluntarily give up access to informal workplace engagement because they need the temporal or geographic flexibility that online work provides.. We also know that there are proportionally more women and people from communities who have traditionally been marginalized at work doing freelancing, relative to the professional workforce. These workers have often found in-person workplaces exclusionary — if not places of harassment. For some online freelancers, getting out of the office made work better.

The value of flexibility noted, across the five years of our ongoing study of how online freelancers pursue their work, the 100+ workers who talk with us make it clear that it is hard to create professional networks, seek work-related guidance and mentoring, build skills, and develop their professional craft. Some of these workers seem okay with this situation — their attention is turned to other parts of their lives (e.g., focusing on child or elder care, or paying more attention to other jobs or avocational interests).

This noted, most of the online freelancers we speak with continue to explore how to build a professional community while working completely virtually.. Knowing this, we have asked about online freelancers’ uses of social media platforms from the very beginning of the study. To our initial surprise, your social media uses for work were both lower than expected and spread across more platforms.

This led us to having a closer look at what is available on various social media platforms. We have been looking at five of the most commonly mentioned social media platforms . We have been looking at what is being shared regarding freelancing, online freelancing, and Upwork (the platform where the online freelancers we are studying do most of their work).

We have learned that each of the social media platforms provide different types of information and resources, with some overlap. Here we highlight some of what we have learned. In future posts we will explore some of these platforms in more depth. In providing these summaries we are not endorsing or promoting any of these platforms, resources, personalities or posts.

YouTube has many how-to resources for online freelancers. These range from getting started guides through to thoughtful guidance on how to improve bids, update your profile, market more precisely, and other topics. There are guides in multiple languages. And there are sources that are both country specific and occupational specific. It will take some work to refine the search term strategy (for instance, generic searches for ‘freelancing’ will get you pointers to movies that have little to do with working on Upwork) The comment sections on these sources are often of little value and may even detract from the message.

Linkedin provides freelancers with a professionally-oriented information-sharing hub. There are multiple groups that focus on freelancing and online freelancing. There are also a number of groups focusing on entrepreneurship, some that explicitly target online work. The posts on these groups range from stories of success through to stories of struggles, scams and disappointments (often focusing on poor behaviors of clients). The comments are typically restrained and some of the groups are moderated.

There are also groups for many of the other online labor platforms. For example, there are at least four Upwork-specific groups, all claiming to be officially sanctioned and branded with the Upwork logo . These have stricter rules about join and posting, often are moderated, and are often places where changes to Upwork’s features and functions, events being hosted, and new resources are announced.

LinkedIn also has a number of people who are actively posting guidance, suggestions, success stories, and pointers to support online freelancing. These influencers sometimes focus on a particular platform (indeed, there are several people actively posting about Upwork on LinkedIn who have thousands of followers). Some focus on country-specific guidance; many more offer specific guidance on bidding or client engagement or marketing.

Facebook hosts a number of freelance-relevant groups. Some are focused on occupational interests (e.g., contract programming, freelance engineers, freelance editors). Others provide forums for those from the same country or region (e.g., for nomadic workers, for those from particular countries who are seeking US-based work, or for those seeking work from clients in a particular country). Most groups have some sort of screening process for admission and are moderated. This makes these groups quite useful resources and also serve as community-like forums for sharing issues and asking questions.

Tiktok has a great deal to offer online freelancers. The content is oriented towards younger people. Many of the posts regarding focus on how to succeed on Upwork, or online, or via freelancing. Some posters offer courses (e.g. “Freelancing 101;” others offer constant updates with tips for getting started, getting better, and making more money. There are many people who seek to be Upwork or freelance influencer (some with upwards of 100,000 followers). The platform’s algorithm is also a fast learner. So, the more you look at online freelancing, Upwork, and brand building posts, the more you will be fed. That makes TikTok an easy place to scan for possibly useful content.

Reddit is a place for questions and responses. There are a number of threads (spaces for discussion) for online work, online freelancing, Upwork and other platforms. Many of these are active and moderated, with useful material being posted — often in response to interesting questions. Norms of participation take some learning. But, these threads often have thousands of participants and there is a wealth of useful information regarding struggles, successes, and guidance on uses. It seems that Upwork employees — or at least people with a great deal of knowledge about Upwork — respond to some posts.

Upwork provides their own online community spaces and a steadily expanding FAQ space that is well organized. Upwork also shared out updates via their Twitter/X account, making it a useful site to follow if you are still on that platform.

One of the insights from the data shared by our participants is that most people rely on one or two of these platforms for insight, support and guidance: very few routinely work across more than two or three. Data also shows that many people do not always check the resources on Upwork on a regular basis.

More broadly, as more people moved into remote work/remote work has become a more common thing, it is becoming increasingly more common to see work-related guidance being shared and discussed online. The rapid growth of many sources of information online regarding working, working online, working online with others, seeking work online, etc., has made it easier for online freelancers to fill the gaps in mentoring, informal guidance, find some sorts of community, and advance their career goals outside of the traditional in-person office space.

Many thanks to Sofia Shore, Ellie Owens, Melina Iavarone and Taylor Lewandowski for the work they have done to learn more about these platforms. In future posts, they will be focusing in more detail on each of these platforms.

Written by Professor Steve Sawyer of Syracuse Univerity. Sawyer is one of the Digital Work Group’s principal investigators.