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By External Contributor on 27th February 2015

How can social media benefit your job search?

Social media has moved on from ambiguous status updates about how much you miss your ex or sharing hundreds of pictures of cats. Now it can prove beneficial when it comes to searching for your next job.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest can benefit your next job search, alongside sites such as CCJM and Jobstoday, and work as an alternative method for reaching out to potential employers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social media platform created for networking purposes, so many people use the site and only connect with people they have worked with before. However, LinkedIn also offers an excellent opportunity to connect with potential employers – simply search for people within the industry you are looking to work in or use the job search tool available that lists jobs in your area.

You can also use your LinkedIn profile as a CV itself (and many job application forms online now simply let you connect your LinkedIn for ease) so be sure to keep it as up to date as possible, include your hobbies and any links to examples of your work. You can also ask colleagues from previous jobs to write you a reference and endorse your skills, for all to see when they visit your profile.

Twitter

With just 140 characters you can make contact with future potential employers on Twitter. If you don’t fancy mixing your personal life and jobseeker experience then set up a separate profile and be sure to send out tweets that are relevant and interesting.

Larger corporations usually have a Twitter account just for vacancies, where they post updates and job advertisements for all to see. However, be prepared to tweet smaller companies directly to ask for work. An upfront approach on social media can really help your work prospects.

Pinterest

You thought pinning to boards on Pinterest was just for brides-to-be and fashion bloggers didn’t you? You couldn’t be more wrong.

Pinterest serves as the perfect platform for an online CV, which looks better than a sad old Word doc or a complicated infographic that you spent a week putting together only to realise when you converted it to PDF there was a horrifying typo in the midst of some text. Use Pinterest as a means to showcase your best work and life experiences so employers can see a nice snapshot of you.

Facebook

Facebook isn’t just for sharing terrible pictures of your friends on nights out, you can also use it to benefit your job search.

‘Like’ the pages of companies you want to potentially work for to keep up to date on with any changes or advancements they are announcing, many companies will also post links to their job vacancies on Facebook to give interested followers a head start.

When it comes to social media benefiting your job search, it can be considered a great alternative to printing off hundreds of CVs and sending them out to employers or spending hours filling out lengthy online application forms.

Just be careful what you post and share, employers will look at your profiles and people have found themselves in hot water or out of work because of their use of social media. Keep it professional with a touch of insight into your personal life as well – save the drunken pictures for Snapchat.

Social Media Articles

By Graham Jones on 23rd January 2015

Being “on” a social network is not the same as using it

It is highly likely that you have a profile on at least one social network. You probably have a profile on at least one of Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. You may also have a Twitter account and maybe an account with Instagram. Indeed, most people have more than one social network profile.

But there is a world of difference between having a social network profile and using that social network.

Whenever I run a workshop for business leaders I ask “are you on LinkedIn?” These days, everyone raises their hand. “Excellent news,” I say, “that means everyone here is on the main business network. So how many of you have used LinkedIn during the past seven days?”

Most of the hands go down; often, nobody in the room has actually “used” LinkedIn. They are there just as passengers on the network, not taking any kind of active part – and wondering at the same time what the point of their LinkedIn profile is.

Google+_screenshot

Now, a new study of the usage of Google+ has found similar – shocking – results.

According to the research, there are 2.2bn Google+ accounts but only around 5m of these are active, posting information that isn’t just a comment on a YouTube video.

In other words 99.8% of people on Google+ are NOT using it.

That tallies with my ad-hoc measurement of people using LinkedIn – the vast majority of people simply have a profile and do nothing with it.

The social networks themselves can point to billions of people who have an account. But having an account and using it are not the same thing.

Businesses are still trying to understand how they can use social networks to increase sales and profits. The problem would appear to be that these businesses seem to think that all you have to do is create a profile and customers will come running to you.

Like most other things in business you get as much out of something as you put in. If all you put in to your social network is your profile, that’s all you will get out.

If you want to make the most of Google+ or LinkedIn you have to put more in. It means adding to the network on a regular basis, taking part in conversations and engaging with people. If you do that, you will get sales and new business leads. If you don’t do that you may as well go down to the corner of your street and whistle into the wind. It will do you as much good as simply having a profile on a social network.

Social

By Graham Jones on 19th January 2015

Social networking means you can “catch” stress

There is increasing evidence that as we use more and more online technology we are becoming more and more obsessed by it. The proportion of people who constantly check their mobile phones for messages or posts from friends is increasing at an alarming rate. Indeed, people are so keen to think they are being communicated with that the majority of phone users receive “phantom buzzes“. This is where they think their phone has vibrated, but it hasn’t; their mind is so geared up to wanting a message it is inventing them all on its own.

Theoretically, this could be linked to stress. The less we feel in control and the more that technology controls us, the more likely we are to be stressed.

There is some evidence that increasing technology use is indeed linked to stress. However, a recent study has revealed an interesting connection between our use of social media technology and our likelihood of having stress.

The research conduced by Pew Internet found that on the whole social networking did not lead to any particular degree of stress. We appear to be taking all the interruptions “in our stride”.

Problems do appear to arise, however, when we see other people online exhibiting stress. We can detect stress in their comments, the images they post and so on.

It turns out that when we see other people showing signs of stress online, we are much more likely to become stressed ourselves.

In other words you can exhibit stress simply because you read something from someone else who is stressed.

Stress is contagious – you can catch it from social networking.

Indeed, for years it has been thought that stress is passed on. In a variety of social settings where anxiety is shown by a small number of people, the surrounding people can increasingly show anxiety. You can witness this in crowd situations where a potential danger is noticed by one or two people, with the anxiety spreading throughout the group. The notion that mood can be passed on from one person to another is nothing new.

However, what this new study shows is that the stress can be passed on through an intermediary – a social network. You no longer need to be present with another person to “catch” their stress or anxiety – you can get it from what they post online.

So what does this mean for us, as users of social networks? It suggests that they are increasing our vulnerability to stress. We are exposing ourselves to a greater likelihood of some kind of stress trigger from the negative emotions of others we engage with online.

Given that stress is linked to fatal conditions such as heart disease and cancer it means that preventing and dealing with stress in our lives is probably more important now than it has ever been in our history.

What does this mean from a practical sense? It means that perhaps we need to set a routine for social media in our lives – looking at it just a few times a day, but not being obsessed by it and checking the networks every five minutes or allowing “notifications” of messages. In other words, we need to manage social networks more, before they manage us.

Internet Psychology

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