Social Media Set-Up–Job Search Lessons Learned: 12 Key Take-Aways (01)

The first step you must do prior to your next job search: check all your social media, blogs, sites, etc. Is there anything out there you don’t want your Grandma or future boss to see? Clean up your mess, if you have one.

As for me, my Facebook is so private; you must be a friend of a friend to even see me. Even so, I went back and cleaned it up. Since then, I have done some public posts, but not many. I still believe that I am allowed some social media privacy. My other social media and blogs, which are public, were all done under a pseudonym and a cartoon personification as my profile picture. I still went through the process of cleaning it up, though. Now, this isn’t to say that I had anything incriminating. But you have to keep in mind that this is the first impression of you, and you have no ability to justify yourself like you would in a conversation. Recruiters and hiring managers may be in a different generation than you, be from a different area, have different values, and so forth, and due to that, you have to be more careful about what you are putting out there. So, for example, I deleted political opinion posts or opinions on any news topic.

After reading the career books and blogs, I decided I needed to have a more public, online presence besides just the LinkedIn profile. I created new social media profiles using my real name and a professional picture to enhance my personal brand. This included a new Twitter, Google+, Facebook page, Instagram, Pinterest, SnapChat, YouTube, Xing, About Me, Reddit, WordPress, Medium, and website. Is this overkill? Do you have to do all of these? All great questions and I have no clue. I do not use them all regularly, but they are there. There are some specific goals with them. At a minimum, I would say ‘yes’ to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Being on Google+ helps with the Google search algorithm. In fact, having all of them helps with the Google algorithm. If you do not use it regularly, have a link in your bio back to your LinkedIn and/or website.

So why are you wanting to do all this social media clean-up?

• Climb the Google search result algorithm.
• Keep it professional while still showing off some personality.
• In concerns with blogging, some individuals just use a certain blog site to discover new articles. I decided to duplicate my entries from the website I pay for, to free WordPress and Medium. I have thought of going back to do that to another blogging site, but that is a lot of extra work.
• Though some experts say not to do this, all the posts on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook are identical at the time of this writing.
• The reason for Instagram and Pinterest was going to be to create pictures with motivational quotes. I have done a few, but not enough.

Once you have them all built out, then you need to start following individuals and companies. I first concentrated solely on famous thought leaders and companies that service my career field. After that was built out, I started to expand a little beyond that. On top of your posts, which we will talk about later, the people you follow can attract people to follow you;  thus, expanding your network and circle of influence.

You are ready! Due to flow, I have the usage part of Social Media staged in the Things You Must Do During Your Job Search; however, now that everything is cleaned and ready, you can actually do posts in parallel with the other items that you should do. I honestly recommend doing this. Follow me, and let me know you read through this, and I will follow back.

 

So here is a question to the community:

“Which social media platform do you use the most for your career?”

 

Thank you for your time,