Social media gets a bad rep. It’s been branded as a tool to waste time, procrastinate and keep up with other people’s lives – which it is – but it also offers so much more.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and twitter are for way more than showing your friends how much fun you’ve had or how much fun you want people to think you’ve had, It can actually be a great tool for networking, connecting with people in different fields, showcasing your resume and helping you find the job you want.
Get more out of Twitter
You can get a lot more out of 140 characters than you think. In between your tweets about people who can’t drive, you can get helpful answers and insight about a specific field, job or company. You could always just tweet your questions to known people in the field or even to the companies themselves. A lot of corporations are active on social media and will happily answer your questions because it shows others that they have customer engagement and it’s a direct and easy way to get a response.
(Note: do not tweet incessantly and harass a company or a person if they don’t reply to you… seriously, don’t be that guy or girl)
Get on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional network. Where instead of posting party pictures, you post your work experience, volunteer experience, skills etc and connect with people in various career fields. It works by connecting you with people you know who are also signed up on LinkedIn and that way you can grow your networking circle. LinkedIn makes it easy to find internships, Full/Part time job positions and if you have the paid version you can see how many people also applied for the job as well. LinkedIn is great because it allows you to stay in touch with your professional contacts. This means that you can add your boss on LinkedIn and not have to worry about them seeing your eleventh thousand cat picture.
Brand yourself
Be careful of what you put on social media, I don’t think it comes as a surprise that employers will Google you and search your social media. It’s not necessary to put everything you do on the internet, If you want to do that and share it with friends look into editing your privacy settings on who can see what types of posts you put up or just keep the wild partying to snap chat where your friends still see it and it disappears after 24 hours. You should be conscious of what you post and think of the future career you’d like to have and the impact a post might have on your job (it can be both positive and negative)
Google yourself
It sounds completely narcissistic but I do this on a regular basis to see what comes up and to get an impression of how others view me when they google me for a job, You’ll never know what will pop up. I remember being so shocked that my name came up in relation to a Facebook post from one of my school groups. The comment itself was innocent but the post was questionable and it wasn’t something I’d like to have reflected on to me so I went back on the post and deleted my comment and voila my association with that was severed. You can not control everything that goes up on the internet, but this gives you a good overview of your online persona and allows you to manage what you can before a future employer sees it.
what are your tips for keeping your social media professional?