Of all the social media tools, LinkedIn is the most beneficial to use for a job search. This tool allows you to establish a professional presence and network with others in your field. Advanced search capabilities for companies and people, as well as the use of groups, allow you to intelligently network and find the people that can help you get your next job.
FaceBook allows you to network with your friends, letting them know of your job search. Updating your status allows you to let your friends know that you're job hunting and what you're looking for. There are groups and fan pages for many companies, allowing you to research the culture of any companies you're targeting for your job search. Applications, such as FaceBook Marketplace are popping up that will help with a job search.
Creating a video resume will help you stand out in this competitive job market. This can be done simply with YouTube. You can imbed your YouTube video resume onto a website or put it on your profile in your other social networking sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter. Another alternative is to use VisualCV to create an online resume, including video and links highlighting accomplishments and publications.
Blogs are useful in a job search, both from the perspective of learning from others as well as establishing your own online presence. There are many ways to find blogs that are of interest. Once you find them, you'll be able to network with people that have interests similar to yours and learn from one another. By publicly commenting on blogs and blogging yourself, you will help establish your credibility and expertise in a certain area. When you leave comments for others, include your name and your the URL of your blog. This will help your name will come up more often in Google searches, and will help establish your brand.
Now that you have a bunch of blogs your reading, you'll need a reader to keep track of the updates. First thing in the morning you can have the latest updates from your favorite bloggers. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for any job sites using keywords so that you'll see any new job opportunities in your field as soon as they're posted.
Using Alerts you can set up Google to email you daily updates using keywords of your choice. You may want to get alerts about your niche market or a particular oganization that you are targeting so you will have the most up-to-date information.
Bookmarking sites, such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon help organize our bookmarks. As we're searching through the plethora of great information that's available, we inevitably want to save articles to go back to. Through use of tagging, we can organize our bookmarks into categories. In addition, we can find articles that others have marked as useful by searching for articles that were tagged with certain keywords. By using a social bookmarking site, we can access our bookmarks we aren't tied to a browser or computer, but can access our bookmarks whenever we have access to the web. Bookmarking your own sites will also help raise visibility to your brand.
Mashable.com is the Bible of all things social media. This is a great reference when learning how to use various social media tools. Mashable often has very helpful articles that relate to the job search.
Meetup.com is a site that is not mentioned much in the social media circles, yet it's a great resource for local networking because it allows for physically meeting face-to-face. There are groups for hobbyists or business professionals. Joining and getting involved in one of these groups will allow you to explore your passions and continue to broaden your network. You can start your own meetup group and gain credibility and contacts at the same time. There are plenty of groups for jobseekers as well. A search for “jobs” in a 25 miles radius of my home came up with 38 groups such as:
- Front Range Career Forum (Job Search Networking & Advice)
- Denver Job Club Meetup (Formerly Unemployed Meetup)
- BoulderNet
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