If you’re looking for career continuation but not aiding yourself via social media, you’re overlooking a great opportunity. These days, very high percentages of employers and recruiters are using primarily social media—or are at least supplementing their searches via social media—to source talent. Guess who loses if they cannot find you or if the information they do find is minimal? On the Internet, most of the information about you should reside in LinkedIn because LinkedIn is the premier platform for business; but don’t underestimate other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. So, here are several tips to improve your social media standing.
- Check yourself out by Googling yourself. If you find something that might be detrimental to your image, work toward taking the information down. Most of the time, though that’s difficult if not impossible to do. On the other hand, work toward becoming active in generating positive information about your professional background and activities. That advice is helpful for currently employed workers, too, because nowadays no job is secure for the long run.
- Create a list of keywords from pertinent job postings as well as from, say, the LinkedIn profiles of others in the same position as yours or one that’s similar. Then make sure to include those keywords when you fill out your profiles on various social media. Stay consistent with such words.
- Spend extensive time on LinkedIn to learn how to improve your profile. This is a never-ending task, and it should not be neglected whether you’re working or looking for work.
- Keep increasing your number of connections not only with people in your industry but also with family and friends. You don’t know the people your family and friends know who could potentially help you.
- The social media trend is to be more and more inclusive, to be community oriented, and to involve as many as people as possible. Consider that advice not only in terms of LinkedIn but also in terms of Facebook and Twitter. Keep joining groups appropriate to you. Then go one step further and become active in those groups. An inactive relationship is almost equal to not having one.
- Twitter is becoming more and more a tool for job seekers to find employers and for recruiters to find qualified candidates.
- Blogging is for everyone. Today it’s very easy to set up a blog site and become active. You don’t have to be an expert in order to blog. Blogging amounts to merely sharing your opinion. But please do so. Remember: you want to be found.
- Help others by sharing your opinion—and others’ opinions too. When you give, you always get.
- A good way to be in front of people is to issue status updates about yourself reasonably frequently. When you do, though, they’d better be professionally meaningful to others; in the professional world, insignificant personal information is a detractor.
- Those who are active on social media probably do better in interviews because they know how to find relevant information about both the prospective employer and the interviewer.
