Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from the most recent session with Nicola James, Managing Partner of Thomas Brooke International.
This week, Nicola focused on strategies for getting the most out of social media. As she notes, in all social media platforms, your profile is the anchor; it’s the thing that allows you to brand yourself and allows those reading your profile to truly understand your value. That means your message should be consistent across all platforms and marketing documents. You should use the same key phrases and the same photo to create a consistent Web footprint.
Twitter is a useful tool and most recruiters are using Twitter, and they answer those that contact them. You can easily search out recruiter contacts using keywords and areas of interest. You do not have to follow everyone, and you can block those whom you don’t want to be associated with. Twitter also makes it easy to make direct contact, where LinkedIn has more boundaries.
Although it seems a poor relation to LinkedIn, Plaxo also is another tool you should consider. It’s a great place to be found and to make sure you post full profile information. Make sure to keep your profile current. People sometimes will find you through Plaxo where they won’t through LinkedIn.
The real benefit of social media is that it makes it easy for others to see you as a thought leader. It’s easy to stay on the cutting edge of what is going on in a company, industry, arena, etc. You can demonstrate that you have relevant knowledge. And social media teaches you to be concise, as you have to be with a “Twitpitch.” You have limited space to make your point, but you always have the option to point back to LinkedIn, a blog entry, or a more in-depth online profile.
Social media also helps you focus. You need to identify one or two things that are really important to your personal brand and articulate them as core capabilities. You need to determine what relevant conversations you need to participate in. You need to be engaged, be collaborative, and be authentic; people respond to authenticity. You also need to be flexible in how you see and do things. By focusing you also improve time management and keep time from going down the drain. Nicola recommends trying to limit your social media activity to 30 minutes each day. She actually spends a half-hour at the beginning of the day catching up with her connections. Make the time count.
(For more on how to leverage your online profile, be sure to check out the latest sessions of Experts Connection, “Not On Google? Do You Exist?” with social media strategist Glenn Raines, which tells you how to get more exposure by building an effective Google profile.)
