Is Twitter a mystery to you as well? Do you pretend to ‘get it’? Well join the club! Thanks to Cheryl Lawson (@PartyAficianado) we now know what Twitter is all about and how to actually use it. Enjoy this infographic and be sure to check out 5 Ways to Boost Your Twitter Bio as well:
The freelance life is really catching on these days. From workplace-weary professionals to recent college graduates, many are excited by the prospect of setting their own schedule and working from the comfort of home.
In the past, the best ways for freelancers to get their names in front of potential clients were non-digital. Cold calls, query letters, and in-person networking were all ways the would-be freelancer could try and land a gig. Those methods worked, and they still can – sometimes.
But social media is shaking things up. Freelancers like me are now finding new business without making nerve-wracking phone calls or even leaving the house. Whether you are looking to freelance full-time or just want a few projects you can tackle on the side, the following tips will help you market yourself through social networks, build connections, and get new clients.
1. Make time for social networking.
If there’s one thing all freelancers know, it’s that they can spend just as much time marketing their services as they can practicing their craft, especially when they’re starting out. Work social networking into your regular marketing regimen. For every query letter you write, for example, you might reach out to two new contacts on Twitter. This alone can get you hundreds of contacts every year, and it takes very little effort.
For those worried about the time investment needed to utilize social media, consider how much time is spent attending face-to-face networking events and banking phone numbers for cold call lists. Setting a goal of just one new contact per day via Twitter or LinkedIn takes much less time and energy than either of those traditional marketing methods, and it’s a much less intrusive way to reach your audience.
2. Know your audience.
Who are you trying to reach? Answering that question should tell you who you need to target on the social networks. It’s certainly possible to start following as many people as possible on Twitter, get several to follow back, and breathe a sigh of relief at all the “social proof” provided by your new arsenal of Twitter followers.
But lots of connections might not a happy freelancer make. It’s important to focus your efforts on those people and industries that are likely to generate new leads for you. Following the tweets of 200 professionals in your niche is much more valuable than following just anybody.
Freelancers who know their audience are able to forge relevant business relationships through social media, and one high-quality contact is worth far more than a million who will never bring you any business.
3. Build your brand.
If you’re a full-time or part-time freelancer, you’re also a small business owner. While creating and maintaining a personal brand is necessary for every professional, remember that freelancers who market through social media also have a professional brand – their business – which is inseparable from their personal brand.
When you freelance, you are your business and your business is you.
Does that mean you’re not free to “be yourself” when using social media? Of course not! On the contrary, you will have the opportunity to display your business to the world with every digital interaction – no matter how “personal” that interaction is. Just be sure the message you send to friends, family, and professional contacts on the social web is one you’re not afraid to associate with your freelance efforts.
4. Utilize multiple channels.
If your results from Twitter are so-so at best, add another network to your social media repertoire. You might be the type of freelancer whose audience is less active on Twitter than LinkedIn, Facebook, or another network. What’s more, you may find your style is more suited to one network than it is to another. The only way to know which ones are best is to try several.
But before you decide one network isn’t best for your business, make sure you’re using it to its fullest potential. Don’t discount LinkedIn, for instance, if you haven’t asked for recommendations and haven’t mingled in several group discussions over an extended period of time. If you’re not taking advantage of what each network offers, you’re unlikely to see results.
Whether it’s full-time or part-time, freelancing has always held professional advantages. Doing great work on behalf of a variety of organizations allows you to connect with scores of contacts who could be helpful down the line. Social media, when properly utilized, lets us freelancers turn our networking up a notch.
Related: 7 Reasons Personal Branding is Important for Freelancers.
Considering the excellent benefits that connecting with professionals on LinkedIn brings, college students can never ignore this social networking platform. In fact, your networking on LinkedIn should begin as early as possible. LinkedIn can help you find jobs as soon as you graduate from college.
However, it’s a regret that college students spend very little time on this professional social networking platform, as compared to the time spent on other popular social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
Given below are some key tips on how college students should use LinkedIn and how they can reap maximum benefits by connecting with professionals on this social networking website.
1. Getting Job Email Alerts
Once you have created your professional profile on LinkedIn, you can set email alerts to receive notifications of recommended jobs. Students and jobseekers will be able to see the notifications on their homepage as soon as they log into their LinkedIn accounts.
2. Connecting with Professionals
If you have a look at LinkedIn, you’ll be surprised to find out the large number of professionals who choose to connect here. In fact, you can find your friends, co-workers, colleagues, classmates and family members on this platform. And it’s never a tough job connecting with them all. What’s more, you can even import your email list to find out who among your friends is present on LinkedIn.
Related: How To Build a Brilliant Professional Network in College.
3. Conducting Company Research
One of the biggest benefits LinkedIn offers college students and jobseekers is that they can check out the pages of their targeted employers. By visiting company, pages, you can conduct a research on the whereabouts of the company, the hiring process and what people have to say about that organization. This kind of company research on LinkedIn can always keep a stay ahead of your competition and increases your employability.
4. Getting Recommendations
LinkedIn also offers a feature through which you can get other people to recommend you. People with a maximum number of recommendations have a great chance of attracting the employers’ attention. College students too can try to get as many recommendations as possible to increase their employability.
Be sure to check out How to Get More LinkedIn Recommendations as well.
5. Letting Companies Find You
Today, a large number of organizations look for talented candidates on social networking platforms like LinkedIn. If you have created a good and detailed professional profile, chances are you will attract employer’s attention. And it would really be nice to be invited by companies for your job position you always wanted to occupy.
6. Connecting with Other Students
College students can also use LinkedIn to network with other students. This type of networking gives you a wonderful opportunity to find out how other college graduates found a job or got hired by an employer.
7. Landing International Jobs
Well, LinkedIn is a global networking platform. If you are interested in landing jobs overseas, you can get a lot of benefits by networking on this social media website. You can connect with all the major international employers and find jobs in foreign countries.
Conclusion
It’s about time that college students too created their profiles on LinkedIn and started to use this social media platform for connecting with professionals. If you prepare yourself as early as possible, you can easily stay ahead of your competition when it comes to landing a job of your interest.
To learn how some people are using LinkedIn to attract employers, get called to interview, and get hired, see the Guerilla LinkedIn Makeover!
James Tomerson writes regularly on career, education and latest job trends. To read more from him, you can visit Jobdiagnosis.com, which also offers jobseekers a free career test to choose a career which is in tune with their career, aptitude and skills.
Since I was really young, I have always shown a passion for the military. Whether it was watching action-packed war movies or running around with toy guns pretending to be a soldier, this was my lifestyle after school. My dad, along with much of my family heritage, also served in the armed forces. He was…
As a machine is only as clever as its user, a LinkedIn account is only as productive as the person in the profile picture. Although most users know by now that simply inputting your name and occupation into the allotted spaces won’t bring in a deluge of opportunities, many don’t know enough about the benefits to go the extra step. It takes courage to press a button sometimes. Here are 10 reasons to increase your account’s productivity.
1. Increase credibility.
Forgive me, but I’ll begin with a no-brainer: the more connections you have, the more credible or at least engrossed in your career you appear. This is good. People like hard workers and are more likely to hire someone who’s earnest and has a strong network presence than someone who doesn’t appear to want to get to know people they already don’t know. Remember that who you know can hold the keys to who you want to know.
See more at How to Connect with New People on LinkedIn.
2. Increase visibility.
The number of connections also increases (or decreases) the likelihood that people searching for someone will find you first. Moreover, LinkedIn profiles get pretty high PageRanks on Google. If you want to take it a step further, customize your public profile’s URL to be your brand or name.
More about optimizing your profile for SEO at How to Make Google Love Your LinkedIn Profile.
3. Be selective with your contacts.
Not to contradict myself, but s/he with the most friends does not win. Sometimes, it’s better not to connect with someone you know or don’t know on LinkedIn. As with our physical lives, excess entities in our virtual lives can create distracting clutter. On the other hand, it doesn’t really pay to be a snob, either. A good start for any new LinkedIn user is to allow LinkedIn to access your email contacts.
Check out 3 Ways to Network on LinkedIn for further reading.
4. Believe in karma.
LinkedIn, while perhaps not as flashy as Facebook or Twitter, is a network like any other: karma exists here. Someone pats your back, pat them back by promoting them, linking to them, connecting with them, and the like. You can begin with good karma by teaching someone the benefits of LinkedIn and showing them the ropes. You can even look up an individual and get an idea for what they need to perform better. You never know when someone from the past will drop a gold mine on your lap.
5. Break the ice.
Go into a job interview more confidently by looking up your potential employer’s LinkedIn profile. Maybe you two both worked at a Starbucks once upon a time. Maybe you went to the same high school. You get the picture.
See more at How to Prepare for Your Job Interview.
6. Evaluate your evaluator.
This is your chance to decide whether or not you want to work for said potential employer. You can even look up individuals who have previously held the position for which you’re being interviewed and see what they have to say about the job and its future. Uncheck the “current titles only” box when doing so.
More on this at How Professional is Your Recruiter? LinkedIn Will Tell You!.
7. Effortlessly make announcements.
When your business has overcome a hurdle, launched a new venture, or undergone some manner of change, update your LinkedIn profile to notify your contacts. This is more seamless and casual than email notifications, which can seem spammy.
Further reading at 10 Tips to Using Your LinkedIn Status Update.
8. Know your competition.
Sneak around the network to get an idea for what the competition is up to, who they’re targeting, and what you can do to one-up them. Less maliciously, you can gauge the status of an industry in which you’re thinking about investing by checking in with succeeding companies from time to time. On the other hand, you can check in with companies who have failed. They can offer you just as much wisdom as those who’ve succeeded.
See more at How to Conduct Employer Research on LinkedIn.
9. Narrow your search.
Searching through LinkedIn can help open-source vendors understand who’s already worked with their software and how. As an employer, you can hire someone whom you already know is familiar with your code. You also get to find out what people find practical about your product and what you can improve about it.
See 3 Great Ways to Finding People to Connect with on LinkedIn for more.
10. Ask and you shall receive.
Not only can you request advice from experts by using LinkedIn’s Answers feature rather than a mere open forum, you can look forward to becoming (and becoming known as) an expert, yourself. This adds to your credibility. As an inquirer and not an expert, you might make a new contact or two, or even a job. If someone is answering your question, obviously you two have something—at least an occupational interest—in common. You might be able to fix each other’s problems; you never know who you’ll stumble across in such a vast network.
LinkedIn has been touted for years as not only a useful tool but also a satisfying experience. It turns your résumé into a living, breathing entity that has, like you, undergone evolution for potential employers and employees across the globe to see. Perhaps least observed is its use in giving ourselves perspective about where we excel, where could use improvement, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
To learn how some people are using LinkedIn to attract employers, get called to interview, and get hired, see the Guerilla LinkedIn Makeover!
Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching medical school loans as well as calculates student loan costs. Whenever this WAHM gets some free time she enjoys doing yoga, cooking with the freshest organic in-season fare, and practicing the art of coupon clipping.
LinkedIn has quickly become one of the largest and most accessible professional social networks out there, and because of this, it’s imperative that everyone who wishes to maximize their career potential join LinkedIn, set up a profile, and begin networking.
Of course, as with many other social networks, there are unwritten rules of etiquette that you must first figure out and then abide as you embark on your LinkedIn journey. Unfortunately, figuring out these rules and not making mistakes or breaking these rules is rather hard for those new to LinkedIn or even social networks in general.
Below I’ve tried to list a handful of mistakes that many LinkedIn users make, and I’ve tried to incorporate solutions into each section. Please, if you know LinkedIn well, feel free to add to the information here in the comments section. And, as always, happy job hunting!
The following are mistakes many LinkedIn users make and how you can avoid them:
1. Failing to Understand Social Networking Contexts
The biggest thing many LinkedIn users fail to understand is that LinkedIn is simply one of many social networks out there. No matter how professional you try to make your LinkedIn profile, the fact that a crazy Facebook profile or irreverent Twitter account under your name exists could significantly hurt your career chances. Do not ignore the other social networks you’ve joined, because recruiters, hiring managers, and others within the industry are looking at these other sites too!
Solution: Google yourself constantly. Manage your entire online presence. Edit your Tweets, check your photos on Facebook, untag yourself from unpleasant photos and conversations, and watch what you post on whatever forums you’ve joined. Always assume that your LinkedIn account is merely a portal that a potential employer can enter in order to access your entire online persona.
See more at 10 Ways to Sweep Your Digital Dirt Under the Carpet.
2. Lacking A Good Profile Photo
This is relatively simple. I’ve seen so many people fail to upload a good profile photo. I can understand why people would wish to not upload a photo; however, lacking a photo can seriously hurt your chances of getting clicked. Think about a recruiter. He or she is browsing entries; is he or she more likely to click on a photo or a tiny bit of text in the search results page? An updated photo of yourself will assure the recruiter that you are, indeed, human after all, with all your quirks and faults.
Solution: It’s much easier for someone browsing search results to connect with a human face than a bit of text, so upload a photo as soon as possible!
Further reading at How to Choose a Picture for Your Personal Brand.
3. Filling Out a Vague Headline
How many LinkedIn accounts have you seen with a bland headline beneath the profile? How many ‘Project Managers’ and ‘Sales Executives’ do you see in that headline? Boring, right? This is a big mistake because users see that the majority of LinkedIn accounts simply list a position title in this field, so they put in their own position because they think that’s what it’s for. Well, the more successful profile headlines are those that say something like “I offer my clients a quick and efficient means of incorporating various security systems into their databases.” It doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, this statement actively states what you do while also giving your voice a chance to shine. Compare that to “Database Security Specialist” and you can see what I mean.
Solution: Market yourself in one sentence. This one sentence should be active, include the word ‘I,’ and concisely state what you can do for a client or employer.
Check out 10 LinkedIn Headline Examples from Recruiters.
4. Not Creating a Personal Narrative
Finally, you’ll see many LinkedIn users stick with the traditional format as suggested by LinkedIn. They basically enter their resume into the form and publish it. Well, how many resumes have you read that you think are incredibly interesting? I’m going to guess you’ve read no interesting resumes, ever. We’re human; we love to hear a story. So why not give others what they want to here: your professional story. Yes, of course, you can still enter your resume; however, you want to be careful in how much you pull from your resume, especially the language of the resume.
Solution: You don’t need to use resume-speak; instead, use longer sentences and active verbs that describe your story. Use the section in your profile that allows you to write a summary to tell your story, the story that isn’t on your resume. That way users can see both aspects of your career resume and aspects of your slightly more personalized professional story.
Related: 7 Pictures You Should Never Use on Your LinkedIn Profile.
This guest contribution was submitted by Pamelia Brown, who specializes in writing about associates degree. She enjoys films by Sergei Eisenstein and drinking Carling lager.
Interviewing recruiters all day can provide you with plenty of anecdotes, as you can imagine. There are lots of benefits to meeting recruiters in person, not least, it’s a fantastic way to analyze what the specific trends are in each market, which sectors are performing well versus those which aren’t particularly. In addition to really…
Categories
How to Find Jobs for College Graduates
As college seniors approach the end of the semester, they have a lot more to think about besides final exams and graduation parties. What they’re planning to do after college life is still a question left unanswered for many.
For those soon-to-be graduates seeking employment, Beyond.com conducted a poll through February and March, asking college seniors how many jobs they have applied to so far. Faced with continued reports on the tough job market, the class of 2011 is clearly taking some initiative. Here’s what the results showed:
• More than 33 percent reported they have already applied for over 40 jobs
• Just about 21 percent of respondents have applied for somewhere between 10 and 20 jobs
• Almost 20 percent have applied for 21 to 40 jobs
• 17 percent have applied for less than 10 jobs
• The smallest percentage, 8.5 percent, have applied for no jobs at all
While the economy is looking much brighter for recent college graduates than it has the past couple years, it still takes that extra something to help young job seekers stand out among the other applicants. Here are some tips to help college graduates be at the top of their games and score entry-level jobs in their fields.
1. Clean up your online image
Yes, employers do Google applicants. Make sure there’s nothing out there you wouldn’t want an employer to see. This includes ensuring your Facebook and Twitter privacy settings are intact and/or change your accounts to be employer-friendly to ensure you’re only viewed as a professional.
2. Start applying now…if you haven’t already
The earlier the better. Many employers start looking for candidates months before graduation, so they are ready to fill the positions in May or June. Try to get ahead of the flood of Spring resumes by applying early and often.
3. Don’t be afraid to network – in person and online
Every opportunity is an opportunity to network! Whether it’s chatting with a professor, staying in touch with an internship coordinator or creating a LinkedIn profile – don’t be afraid to put yourself out there professionally. The worst thing that can happen is nothing. Many people say landing a job is “all about who you know.” Well, the more people you are connected with virtually and in-person, the more chances you have of hearing about an employment opportunity.
4. Target your job search
While not every opportunity is going to be your dream job, you can target what you want if you find job postings in a niche job board or LinkedIn group. For example, if you’re looking for finance jobs, find a place where these types of jobs are posted specifically. Niche job boards offer more targeted job search results and a greater variety of relevant job opportunities.
5. Download mobile job search apps
Everyone is attached to their Smartphone these days, so why not receive job alerts and do some job-searching on the go?
Check out the 20 Best Career-Enhancing iPhone Apps for more ideas.
6. Utilize your school’s career services
It’s likely that your college or university has a career services office. While you’re still a student, make use of these services by making an appointment to have your resume critiqued or do a mock interview. Also, join a professional student organization or participate in groups/activities on campus that are good resume builders. For example, if you’re an advertising major, you could join American Advertising Federation (AAF).
7. Prepare for interviews – homework & “thank you’s”
If you’ve received a call back after applying for a job, you need to be prepared and on top of your game. To stand out from the other interviewees, research the company beforehand. Have questions to ask – this will show you are interested. Also, send a hand-written thank you note or an email thank you at the very least.
Check out How To Prepare for Your Job Interview for more tips.
8. Gain experience while job-searching
If you have some spare time while applying for jobs, take on an internship in your desired field. This will give you extra experience to put on your resume and show that you took the initiative to advance your skill-set instead of waiting around or taking an irrelevant job.
9. Attend career fairs
Career fairs are a great way to get in front of multiple employers looking to hire and network face-to-face. It provides the opportunity to showcase your communication skills and personality while participating in mini-interviews. It can help move your resume to the top of the pile.
10. Create an online career portfolio
Distinguish yourself from other candidates and create a powerful web page that will display your skills and experiences to show employers that you’re willing to go the extra mile and are committed to your job search.
Rich Milgram is the Founder and CEO of Beyond.com, Inc. Since January 1998, Rich has developed and grown the company as a highly niche-specific web community, consisting of more than 15,000 sites providing services to business professionals and corporations to promote growth in career, business and life.
Your Linkedin profile is your shop window to recruiters and potential employers and the first place in which potential recruiters will look when they are considering contacting you. Here are our top twelve tips to make sure your Linkedin profile is found by the RIGHT people: 1. Consider your job-seeking objectives Like any social networking…