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The Never Ending Evolution of Social Media

by Barbara Safani

Social media is changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Each time I visit one of my social networking profiles, I learn something new about how to manage it more efficiently or how job seekers can optimize their time on these sites. I frequently meet people who share a novel piece of information about how to leverage these sites or what the new features are. Here are a few new things I have learned over the past few months.

LinkedIn Events. A sales person from LinkedIn that I met recently suggested that a great way to differentiate yourself as a job seeker is to follow the events in your field posted on LinkedIn and sign up for the appropriate ones. Many recruiters look at who is attending certain industry events rather than wading through LinkedIn profiles because they believe the real thought leaders and people who are passionate about what they do may be more likely to be attending these industry events. Here’s some additional information I learned about LinkedIn for job seekers during this sales person’s presentation. www.careersolvers.com/blog/2010/01/11/linkedin-job-search-tips-from-the-pros/

Facebook Privacy. The default settings on Facebook allow everyone to see everything on a person’s profile from status updates to birthdays, religious views, and pictures. Even people who thought their privacy features were set would be wise to recheck them because Facebook made several changes last year that may have reset your privacy features to default settings that, well, aren’t very private. And remember that information from Facebook may now be visible to the search engines depending on which privacy settings you have elected. We need to be on top of what we are sharing and how to best manage our privacy settings. Here’s a link to an article from The New York Times that explains the privacy changes to Facebook. www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/01/20/20readwriteweb-the-3-facebook-settings-every-user-should-c-29287.html

Brazen Careerist Fan Pages. Recently Brazen Careerist released their Top 50 Gen Y Companies list www.brazencareerist.com/top-50 and they then created fan pages for these companies. By becoming a fan of these companies, visitors can follow their Twitter stream and find out information on job leads and other company news. In addition, by becoming a fan, users can interact directly with someone at that company rather than going the job board route.

Company Buzz. Company Buzz is an application on LinkedIn that lets you track in real time who is saying what about certain companies and people on Twitter. This is an excellent way to be in the know about companies you are targeting and it could be an excellent way to generate questions about the company during an in-person interview.

Hootsuite and Send Later. . When I first joined Twitter I resisted using tools that automated tweets and allowed you to schedule them to be sent at a later date because I thought it compromised the whole purpose of Twitter which was to tweet about what you were doing or thinking at the moment. But since I started using Hootsuite which has the send later feature built right into the dashboard, I have changed my mind. I now think the feature is a great way to save time on some of the more administrative tasks on Twitter such as thanking people for retweets, scheduling #Follow Fridays, or just spacing out your tweets so your audience isn’t bombarded with messaging from you all at one time.

Brand-Yourself.com. I think this is a site to watch out for. The dashboard lets users build their online identity and manage their online reputation. It gives visitors a quick snapshot of their online mentions, tools to build a stronger presence, and prompts to teach them how to grow their online relationships, visibility, and credibility.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and there are so many other new things popping up on the social media circuit every day. But these are certainly features to pay attention to on a regular basis to help manage our own social media presence.

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