Social Media Strategy for Staying Employed in the 21st Century

Do you have a Social Media Strategy to stay employed? If you do not, you should.

Social Media Strategy

The world of employment has changed. We are rapidly moving to a contract employment model. A job lasting three years is a very long time. Companies no longer post jobs but are out searching for talent. Do you want to be found?

You need a presence on Social Media so you can be found. What are companies looking for? They are looking for your body of work or portfolio!

Artist, photographers, graphic designers and other creative types are used to maintaining a portfolio. Even when I was a public school teacher we were encouraged to maintain a portfolio of lesson plans.

Do you have a portfolio that has examples of your body of work?

Let’s talk about how we build this for your future.

Blogs

A blog is you way to publish your body of work. You are reading my blog where I publish 300-500 word articles three times a week. Over the last 14 months I have published 160-170 articles. Search engines find these articles 20-30 times a day.

Do you have to do this three times a week?  NO. Just do it consistently. Once a week, once every other week,…..

The other function of blogs is to start a conversation. Your readers can comment on what is written. This is important because a conversation is critical to building relationships with others in your industry. We will talk about commenting on blogs in a future post.

More on blogs in future posts.

LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is a critical piece in your online presence.

The sections that you need to focus on include:

• Photograph – Yes, you need a good picture. Read more in this article titled – Baby Boomers and Your Picture in Social Media.
• Headline – This is a 120 character field that allows you to brand yourself. Read more in this article titled – 1st Place to use Keywords is in your LinkedIn Headline
• Summary – You need to write your brand story. Read more this article titled – Baby Boomers and Your Brand Story
• Recommendations – Recommendations are one of the most powerful features of LinkedIn. Recommendations are a way to get other people to brag for you. Read more in this article titled – Your Brand Story and Recommendations and Managing LinkedIn Recommendations
• LinkedIn Applications – There many LinkedIn applications that allow you to display your portfolio. More on this in a future post.

Personal Websites

You can create your own personal website. I found a good example published by a former colleague Geno Zaharie. Geno used iWeb to publish a simple but effective portfolio. Check out his website but more specifically his Skill Samples page (this is a large page and may take a while to load).

Portfolio of You

Do you already have content created? If you do start putting it online. If not, start slowly but be consistent. It is best if this is done on an ongoing fashion. Creating content consistently is the best way to keep the search engines looking at your site.

Next we will talk about how to get people to your portfolio!

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Marc Miller Career Design Specialist