In our earlier articles, we talked about digital assets. These online platforms include websites, blog sites, and social media. They are basically platforms where you share your views and communicate with other people digitally and online.
As you do so, you create an online personal persona, something professionals in the digital marketing world refer to as a Personal Brand. That is a series of content postings that reflect your values and professional skills.
It does not matter how heavy or light a user of the platform you are, as long as you post content (even occasionally), you are creating an online personal brand. In this article, we are going to explore various ways you can use that to enhance your job search.
Make Your Social Media Personal Brand Do The Job Hunting
Social media can be a very powerful tool when used in the right way and targeting the right audience. We know places in the world where the typical civilians have managed to overthrow the dictatorship regime through mobilizing fellow citizens on social media.
While you are not trying to start a riot or anything, but that example only goes to show the power of social media. That is giving everyone a voice. For you, as a job seeker, social media can be a bridge across the waters of bureaucracy that is conventional job hunting platforms.
That said, below are some tips on how you can create a strong personal brand on social media, and put yourself in front of the eyes of recruiters searching for talents, skills, and experience.
- A Fully Complete Profile
The foundation of a personal brand on social media is full disclosure of yourself. These are basic things like having a clearly visible profile picture (with you looking approachable, so smile). Other information such as your location (city, country), professional skills, what you do (where you do it).
These are basically what you are asked to fill out when signing up for a social media account. Of course, there is some sensitive information you give out while signing up, but they will not be shown on your profile. That is things like your email address and age among other things.
2. Identify the Appropriate Social Media Platform
No two different social media platforms are equal; each has its unique target market. So, you can’t just get on social media for the sake of it. You first need to identify which platform that has most of your target audience and focus on it.
You will be doing yourself an injustice if you are present across all social media platforms. Your time and energy would be stretched thin on all of them, while you would have been more effective in as far as getting across your target audience if you focused on just one platform. So, focus on a platform where most of your audience is present, and you can familiarize yourself thoroughly with all the little tweaks and tricks unique to that platform, which could help you maximize your visibility.
3. Build a Brand Around Your Area of Expertise
Everyone is talented at something, and there is no doubt about that. The hard part is discovering yourself and where your talent lies. When you have found your talent, it will be easier to build a personal brand around that; then you can take to social media to build an online persona on it.
It could be you have a ‘Wikipedia knowledge’ of the best SEO practices, you are a great writer, a rock star content marketer, a stellar graphic designer, or a dead shot web designer. Whatever it is, you need to build an online brand around that and become an authority within that space.
Social media will only help you accentuate what you already have, but you need to know your talent and roll up your sleeve to ‘bring it’ each time an opportunity arises. Now that you have zeroed in on your area of expertise, it is time to create engaging content on the topic and share it on social media.
The content you create needs to be insightful, up-to-date, and relevant. You will basically be talking about your trade, and if you know your craft, then meeting that standards in the content you will be churning out should be easy.
4. Automate Postings on Your Social Media
To have a strong personal brand on social media, you must be consistent and regular in your postings. However, not many of us have the time and effort to be posting on social media at say, 10 AM every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
You might be busy with other things, such as work, family, leisure, and hobbies. The good news is you don’t need to be as punctual as a clockwork in creating the content. You can pick one or two days of the week when you can sit down and create content to be posted the following week.
Numerous third-party apps can help you automate postings on your social media. Some like Tweetdeck comes for free. Premium ones include Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout. You can pick a day during the week when you are free, like over the weekend, create the content, and let them post throughout the week.
While your content will be posting consistently throughout the week, you will only need a day or two in a week to create the content. The posting will be on auto-pilot mode. Such apps will make your posting consistent throughout the week, which will go a long way in creating a consistent persona.
5. Content is King – Make Yours Engaging
The quickest way to build a strong personal brand is by posting highly engaging original content. It cannot be overemphasized enough on why the content needs to be original and your own creation. A person who posts original content can quickly command authority in that field.
To be able to create fresh and original content, you will need to take some time to study the industry thoroughly. Have an out of the box approach and share some new insight that your target audience may not already be aware.
That is how your audience will gravitate towards what you share on social media. The more they do over time, the stronger your brand becomes on social media. At which point, any recruiter looking to hire someone in your field, they will look at how much of an authority you are and how much audience you have built up over time.
There will be little impediments on your way to getting hired by them. However, it would be best if you were not exclusively posting just your content on social media accounts. Now and then, be sure to repost content from other authorities within the space.
Doing so serves two purposes; it gives your audience a broader outlook of the space from various sources and it can help spark a discussion between you and the person whose content you are sharing. Especially if by sharing their content, they get to notice you and with time, they also begin commenting and sharing your posts.
6. Build Your Audience From People You Already Know
At the point in time, when you are signing up for a social media account with zero postings and followers. It might seem an uphill task to build up an audience. However, you will be surprised just how many people you know that are already on social media.
You can begin by importing your people from your contact list. Perhaps by searching if they already enlisted to the social media platform, or sending them an invite to join. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter allows you to import your contacts from your phonebook, Gmail, and Outlook.
Social media is fun when you get social; get the likes, retweets, and comments. It is much easier to get those when people you already have a relationship with in real life have also connected with you on social media.
Then as you keep building your online persona (through sharing engaging content), other people who are not from your contact list will be drawn. Thanks to the sharing and commenting from your current social media followers.
It would help if you made your profile accessible by everyone. Don’t make your profile private when you want to grow a brand.
7. Join Groups of Like-Minded Users
The big social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) provide ways for like-minded individuals dealing with the same industry to form groups where they can interact with each other.
It is vital that you seek out search groups, discussing matters within your industry, and join. That way you can share your view with the group, and the members will be able to appreciate and relate with what you are saying.
As opposed to sharing posts to random people, some of whom will not be able to understand what you are saying. Simply because they do not operate in the industry, plus it helps to tone down the noise. Sharing your content in a small group where people immediately understand the message you are putting across, goes a long way than just putting it out there amidst all that noise on social media.
Also, joining like-minded groups can help your personal growth by challenging you when you see someone else within that group with a higher accomplishment. It makes you more accountable for the content you are churning out because you can’t afford to drop the ball in front of the eyes of people who understand the industry.
You also get new ideas and perspective from what’s being shared in the group. Develop some leadership skills, gain some confidence, and test your knowledge, among other things that will help you become more authoritative in the field.
8. Stay Consistent
There should be some consistency in your social media presence. That needs to be seen in the images, videos, and text you are posting. Let everything you do accentuate your brand all the time; that is not to say that you should be only posting your content.
If you do repost other people’s contents, make sure the message contained is in line with your brand’s message. If you talk about technology and have built up an audience around that topic, when you start talking about politics, you will start losing followers. Especially if the politics you are talking about has nothing to do with how technology impacts the space.
9. Keep a Watchful Eye on Influencers
You can learn a lot about branding yourself and growing your online personal from influencers. So you need to identify who are the influencers in your market, and even copy some of the things they are doing.
If you can connect and collaborate with them on some projects that would be great in uplifting your brand within the space, for that to happen, you need a plan on how to connect and build a relationship with these influencers, before you become a brand on your own to be respected.
Luckily that work has been partly made easy thanks to influencer marketing tools, which can help you zero in on who are the real influencers within a given space. Armed with that knowledge, you can then approach them to simply connect, and from there, work on building a relationship.
10. Stay Positive
There is a lot in this world that can drag someone down into negativity and even depression. Many people out there are struggling to remain positive. The last thing they want is to come online on social media and find you reasserting their fears.
Instead, you should focus on the positive side of things, and radiate out that energy into your followers. Try to avoid posting negative stuff and things that will not build up on the hope people already had when they came online.
In Conclusion
Creating a strong positive persona on social media makes you an authority within the given space. When a recruiter gets on social media looking for someone with your set of skills and experience, having a strong brand will make them consider you first and fast.
So while you are out job hunting, don’t focus only on brushing up your resume. Start networking and your social media accounts are an excellent place to start.
Article provided by, The Digital Marketing Recruiter – a recruiting firm focused exclusively on filling digital marketing positions throughout the USA
We welcome your inquiries….