Social Media Usage–Job Search Lessons Learned: 12 Key Take-Aways (08)

Start using social media if you haven’t already. We want you to be discoverable via internet searches. Going back to the setup article, remember, the more you post, the higher probability you will be found. This will be discoverable by future hiring managers, recruiters, and colleagues.

Post about your experiences, what is new in your industry, quotes, thought leadership, and so forth. My personal goal is to focus on leadership, ITIL, IT Service Management, Project Management, and process improvement posts. Please, no pictures of shot-gunning a beer or your latest bikini tan lines, though. OK?  Your minimum goal should be a professional posting once a week, with your optimal goal being once a business day. Tweak what I do to make it work for you and your style.

Trying to post to all these sites manually can become quite time-consuming. When I started to try to post regularly, I would I post on LinkedIn, and have it automatically post to Twitter. Then, that Twitter post automatically posts to my Facebook page (not profile). Unfortunately, Google+ doesn’t have that feature and got forgotten quite often. I didn’t do a lot with pictures at the time, so Instagram did not receive traction.

Social Media Made Easy

At one point down the road, I remembered something called HootSuite. There are paid accounts and an unpaid. The unpaid account allows you to post to three social media accounts. I discovered another one called Buffer. For both, you can schedule posts ahead of time! This helps a ton. You can choose to do your own time or the services can figure out the optimal time based on the specific social media site.

When I am listening to a podcast, reading a book or blog, there may be several items I want to post. Now, I can spread and schedule those out. The more you post, the more followers/connections you get. The more you get, the more interaction you will have, and you will start to climb on the search result ladder.

Personally, I use Buffer to post to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+, and HootSuite for Instagram, Facebook personal page, and Facebook page. At the time I am scheduling, I am also pinning that week’s post on my Social Media board on Pinterest. Social Media posts with accompanying media are more likely to be reviewed then without, so I use Pablo to help create a lot of my quote posts over pictures.

Blogging

If you want to have a larger platform to go into certain subjects in more detail, you can write articles about it and use social media mentioned above to distribute the content. I cannot remember where or from whom I heard this from, but even if it is just a 200-word article, it is blog post worthy.

I use three different services to posts blogs. The blogs themselves are the exact same. The reason I do this is to increase the chances of being higher in SEO (search engine optimization). I use my main website, a free WordPress, and a free Medium. Some individuals may only use WordPress or Medium to get their blog content.

Just like regular social media posts, you should post consistently (daily, weekly, bi-weekly). I would love to post weekly, but I have failed in this area for… reasons; however, as our parents always say “Do as I say, not as I do.”

So here is a question to the community:

“What social media platform do you find yourself using the most?”

Thank you for your time,