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Thursday, June 23, 2011

Social Media and the job search

Are you using social media in your job search? If not, why not?

Over 100 million users are on LinkedIn, 700 million users are on Facebook and 175 million users on Twitter. Now assuming that each of those networks only has 80% of those users who are active, that is still a BIG number. Of people using social networking sites, the use breaks down this way: 92% use Facebook, 18% use LinkedIn, 13% use Twitter. [Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, Social networking sites and our lives, June 16, 2011]

LinkedIn is the biggest source of professional networking. You can follow companies, find jobs, and build your level of expertise. Facebook now has an answer to LinkedIn called Branchout. You can ask your Facebook friends to join you in your professional network and receive recommendations. Twitter has post after post of jobs that you can find even if you don't tweet yourself. Just go to search.twitter.com.

LinkedIn has a search component that will show you who is posting about a particular term like "hiring" that you can drill down and get to your local area. Did you know that more men 63% vs. 37% women use LinkedIn.[Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, Social networking sites and our lives, June 16, 2011] Women tend to be bigger users of the other social networks.

Remember, you can't just create a profile and let it hang there on the web, you must work at it, as you must with any job search process.  If you need to learn more about using social media, you can visit our website. OR you can sign up for one of our hands-on LinkedIn workshops - check our calendar for the next session.

What are you doing with social media and your job search?