Are you struggling to figure out how to best leverage social media into your job search marketing plan? My upcoming book, "I'm Job Searching, Now What???" will delve into using social media as one of the multiple strategies in your job search. I wanted to touch on a couple of ways you might use social media in your job search with Twitter.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, etc. all provide a great research platform. I use LinkedIn many times when I'm researching a company because not only does it give me the company information, key statistics, news articles, etc., but it also provides me information about with whom I'm connected. I use this information to see if the company and my connections within the company are on Twitter. If they are, I will begin to follow them. Why? I may be able to get a sense of company culture, job postings that the company lists, etc.

Hashtags are a way to identify a topic of interest on Twitter. Probably one of the most well known is #FollowFriday or #FF where people recommend other people to follow. You can also identify job postings using hashtags. One of the easiest ways to search to find hashtags and related keyword hashtags is to use www.hashtags.org. I ran a search on#jobs and came up with several related hashtags. Below the tag results, you will see the latest tweets pertaining to those hashtags.

I then ran a search using the keywords "hiring" and "manufacturing" and received results showing all the recent tweets showing the job posts for manufacturing positions posted on Twitter. You'll notice at the end of each tweet they have included an identifying hashtag of

#jobs, #tweetmyjobs, etc.

Many companies are beginning to use social media platforms and their own websites to post jobs. Why? Look at the article on 7-Eleven's New and Improved Sourcing Strategy: Will Social Media Replace Job Boards? According to them, here's one way social media helped:

"Quality of Hire- While many high-performing employees are now out of work, 7-Eleven is not receiving quality candidates from job boards. To prove this point, the Director of Talent Acquisition conducted an experiment. He decided to post one job on LinkedIn and the 7-Eleven career site rather than the job boards. In a short period of time, he received 86 quality resumes."

Social media is changing the landscape of traditional job searching. Are you using social media as one of multiple strategies in your job search? If so, share your success stories with us!

Cross posted by Kristen Jacoway at Career Design Coach

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