How to Hunt for a Job Using Social Media

Securing a job is the tough part, but scouting an open position? All it takes is a strategic scroll through your favorite social media accounts.

Sites like Twitter and Facebook can be fun and frivolous, but they’re also viable business opportunities. Plumbing through accounts, hashtags and personal pages could help launch next potential career.

Want to find a writing opportunity in a town near you? Just look up a hashtag on Twitter. Want to stay up to date with a company’s career openings? “Like” them on Facebook. Want to create a beautiful resume that’ll catch a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s eye? Head over to Pinterest.

Here’s how to land your perfect job via social media.

1. Twitter

In 140 characters or less, Twitter can help you find your dream gig. It’s teeming with job applications and professional networking pages, if you know where to find them.

a. Searches: Use that search bar to look for terms that apply to the job you want. For best results, type in words like “jobs,” “hiring” and other specifics that apply to your desired field and location; for example, “writer” and “New York City.”

b. Hashtags: Typing #jobs and #hiring will result in a plethora of tweets from those seeking employees. Employers who want to cast a wide net will often tweet out job applications, with accompanying hashtags.

c. Tweet often: Though it depends on your career of choice, tweeting is a great way to network with like-minded folks in your profession. Follow businesses and people you’re interested in and don’t be afraid to send them the occasional tweet. (On that note, make sure your Twitter account is polished and professional).

d. Follow away: There are dozens and dozens of Twitter accounts dedicated to posting job applications. Go to the search bar and type in “jobs,” then click “People” on the left-hand side. You’ll soon see all the Twitter accounts with “jobs” in the username and can gleefully press the “Follow” button.

2. Facebook

Facebook is an undeniable social media juggernaut. According to its representatives, these are the top tips for trying to get a job through Facebook:

a. “Like” some pages: Most companies strive for dynamic social media presences, and Facebook Pages are engagement 101. By “Liking” them, you can get daily updates about their activity. Plus, they will likely post links to available job applications.

b. Private/Public: Take a thorough look at your privacy settings on Facebook, and make sure you know exactly how others view your Timeline. However, you should consider setting your work and education info public, enabling others to see your professional history.

c. Stay updated: Make sure all of your work and education info is up to date and reflects your current position and past experience.

d. Add “Professional Skills:” A few months ago, Facebook added a “Professional Skills” portion to the “About” section. Underneath work and education, add skills you’ve acquired, optimizing your professional appeal.

3. LinkedIn

Perhaps the most obvious of job hunting sites, LinkedIn is the network of choice for professionals.

a. Connect: Unlike Facebook, it’s a little less creepy to connect with strangers on LinkedIn, because everyone there is looking for networking opportunities. Connect to people who have careers you’re interested in, and search around for those who might only be one degree away from you. For inspiration, check out the member stories portion of LinkedIn’s blog, where users share their success anecdotes about networking through the site.

b. Jobs Board: Not only does the site provide you with advice and connections, but it also has a jobs board highlighting available opportunities in nearly every field.

c. Endorsements and recommendations: There’s a portion of your profile dedicated to glowing recommendations and endorsements from your peers. Try to get as many as you can, and your page’s likability will instantly boost.

d. Share more: According to LinkedIn’s Career Expert, Nicole Williams, sharing articles or content with your network boosts your chances 10 times for getting contacted by a recruiter. When you share content, it proves your knowledge in the industry.

e. List all the things: Your profile is 12 times more likely to be viewed by a hiring manager if you have a detailed list of work experience, Williams says. The more robust your profile is, the more experienced and hirable you look.

4. Tumblr

You can use Tumblr, that vast Internet playground of GIFs and rabid fandoms, for help in the job search.

a. Search tags: In the search bar, look for tagged terms like “hiring” and “jobs.” It’s a bit harder to separate the wheat from the chaff in the tag-happy blogging community, but you’ll still be able to find plenty of cool companies advertising open jobs via Tumblr.

b. Start Tumbling: This is especially important if you’re the creative type. A Tumblr account attuned to your interests, and full of your own original content, automatically ups your unique appeal to employers. In addition, a good Tumblr following can lead to job offers from employers who happened to stumble upon your site.

5. Pinterest

Yes, Pinterest is more than just a pretty place to find wedding inspiration and delicious recipes.

a. Pin your résumé: Tired of the standard, one-sheet format? Use a Pinterest board to “pin” your résumé. You can highlight certain aspects of your experience and add photos and links. See Rachael G. King, a social media manager at Sidecar who created a “living résumé.”

b. Follow these pages: For a never-ending well of job tips and opportunities, follow these seven helpful Pinterest boards.

Engagio: Recognize & Build Relationships On Social Network Easily

Engagio helps you to track your online conversations and allows you to develop meaningful relationships from them. In short, it is your tool to find quality relationships.

Pitched as ‘Your inbox for online conversations and relationships’, it is a tool much like Gmail, but is for managing your conversations in social networking sites and commenting systems. Engagio gives you visibility about the people behind these conversations and reveals their social identities profile. It saves you much time and allows you to connect with others in a much better and deeper way.

Although social media has many advantages, sometimes we fall short of managing our many relationships on social networking sites. With so many friends, family members, colleagues, classmates and relatives in our contacts list, we miss out on building quality relationships with people who matter. Engagio helps you to do that and more.

Engagio believes that commenting and conversations are strong social signals. They are stronger than likes, shares and links. Comments are implicit linkages about people. After all, you only care to comment on somebody’s post and take time to do it when you like that person or what s/he has to say. Like is easy, commenting takes time and thought. Engagio studies all that and more, and give you full visibility into the potential relationships behind your comments and conversations.

The service is frictionless and derives implicit data from your normal, everyday interactions. It does not matter whether your conversations are on social networks or inside your Engagio inbox, Engagio tracks them all. You connect to your social networks and Engagio starts to track, record, analyze and report on your interaction activity.

All you need to do is to signup from the entry page or jump to your inbox. You can easily track your conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Disqus-enabled sites, Hacker news comments, Foursquare and more. This is a wonderful service for everybody who wishes to build up on great relationships without putting in much time and effort.

Share API

Reading and Creating Shares

Use the Share API to have a member share content with their network or with all of LinkedIn. This can be a simple short text update, similar to Twitter.  Or a URL with a title and optional photo. Or both.

You can also forward the shared content to Twitter and reshare another member’s share.

This feature replaces the deprecated Status Update API and fields.

Adding New Shares

To add a new share, you markup the content in XML and issue a  HTTP POST to the following URL:

URL

POST	http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/shares

To have LinkedIn pass the status message along to a member’s tethered Twitter account, if they have one, modify the URL to include a query string of twitter-post=true.

Fields for the XML Body

Node	Parent Node	Required?	Value	Notes
share	—	Yes	Child nodes of share	Parent node for all share content
comment	share	Conditional	Text of member’s comment. (Similar to deprecated current-status field.)	Post must contain comment and/or (content/title and content/submitted-url). Max length is 700 characters.
content	share	Conditional	Parent node for information on shared document
title	share/content	Conditional	Title of shared document	Post must contain comment and/or (content/title and content/submitted-url). Max length is 200 characters.
submitted-url	share/content	Conditional	URL for shared content	Post must contain comment and/or (content/title and content/submitted-url).
submitted-image-url	share/content	Optional	URL for image of shared content	Invalid without (content/title and content/submitted-url).
description	share/content	Option	Description of shared content	Max length of 256 characters.
visibility	share	Yes	Parent node for visibility information
code	share/visibility	Yes	One of anyone: all members or connections-only: connections only.

Sample XML

Here is an example XML document:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 83% of employers will use social media to hire: 78% LinkedIn, 55% Facebook, 45% Twitter [SF Biz Times] -->http://bit.ly/cCpeOD Survey: Social networks top hiring tool - San Francisco Business Times http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/06/28/daily34.html</submitted-url> <submitted-image-url>http://images.bizjournals.com/travel/cityscapes/thumbs/sm_sanfrancisco.jpg</submitted-image-url> </content> <visibility> <code>anyone</code> </visibility> </share>

Response

Returns 201 Created on success. It will also provide a Location HTTP header with a URL for the created resource. However, at this time, you cannot retrieve the Share from that location. It’s there for future compatibility.

Resharing An Existing Share

When a member does a reshare, they can pass along a previously shared item to their network. This can either be as-is, or they can annotate the share to provide their own thoughts. The process is similar to creating a new share, but you provide an attribution/id value instead of a content block.

You can only reshare a share with a content block. If this block is empty, you will get a 400 error saying “Specified share {s28311617} has no content”.

Read Retrieving Share Information for instructions to retrieve these value using the API.

URL

POST	http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/shares

Fields for the XML Body

Node	Parent Node	Required?	Value	Notes
share	—	Yes	Child nodes of share	Parent node for all share content
comment	share	No	Text of member’s comment. (Similar to deprecated current-status field.)	Max length is 700 characters.
attribution	share	Yes	Parent node for information on reshared document
id	share/attribution/share	Yes	id of reshared document	Currently in the format of s12345678, so is not guaranteed to be an integer.Post must contain id if it does not contain content and id must be from a share with a content block.
visibility	share	Yes	Parent node for visibility information
code	share/visibility	Yes	One of anyone: all members or connections-only: connections only.

Sample XML

Here is an example XML document:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> Check out this story! I can't believe it. s24681357 -->connections-only

Response

Returns 201 Created on success. It will also provide a Location HTTP header with a URL for the created resource. However, at this time, you cannot retrieve the Share from that location. It’s there for future compatibility.

Retrieving Share Information

A particular member’s current share is detailed in their Profile API, so you can get a member’s current share by requesting:

GET	http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(current-share)

Use the ~, id, or public profile URL to identify the user.

To retrieve a stream of shares for the member or their member first degree network, use the Get Network Updates API resource requesting the SHAR update type.

For the specified member also use a query parameter of scope=self:

GET	http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network?type=SHAR&scope=self

Omit the scope for their first degree network:

GET	http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network?type=SHAR

You will receive:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> s12345678 1279577156654 83% of employers will use social media to hire: 78% LinkedIn, 55% Facebook, 45% Twitter [SF Biz Times] -->http://bit.ly/cCpeOD</comment> <content> <id>123456789</id> <title>Survey: Social networks top hiring tool - San Francisco Business Times</title> <submitted-url>http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/06/28/daily34.html</submitted-url> <shortened-url>lnkd.in/abc123</shortened-url> <submitted-image-url>http://images.bizjournals.com/travel/cityscapes/thumbs/sm_sanfrancisco.jpg</submitted-image-url> <thumbnail-url>http://media.linkedin.com/media-proxy/ext...</thumbnail-url> </content> <visibility> <code>anyone</code> </visibility> <source> <service-provider> <name>LINKEDIN</name> </service-provider> <application> <name>Your Cool App</name> </application> </source> <current-share>

Fields for the XML Body

Beyond the fields listed above, you also receive:

Node	Parent Node	Value	Notes
id	share	Identifier for share.
timestamp	share	Time of posting in miliseconds since UTC. (Divide this number by 1000 to get the standard Unix timestamp.)
shortened-url	share/content	Short version of the submitted-url. If the submitted-url is generated via a URL shortener, this is the original URL and the submitted URL is the expanded version. Otherwise, this is a LinkedIn generated short URL using http://lnkd.in/.
resolved-url	share/content	The submitted-url unwound from any URL shortener services.
author	share/attribution/share	Information on the author of the original shared item.	Only appears when retrieving a reshare, not an original share.
name	share/source/service-provider	Platform where the share came from, such as LINKEDIN or  TWITTER.
name	share/source/application	Application where the share came from, such as the name of your application.

Social Media is a Contact Sport

Every now and then I come across people who lament their small following on Twitter, lack of comments on Facebook, and low number of connections on LinkedIn. Yet, these same people don’t post tweets, update their status, comment on blogs, nor make an effort to network with professional connections. Think of social media as a contact sport that requires energy. Merely sitting on the bench does not make allstars. As with any sport, the rewards are reaped after much practice and some effort.

So, go out there and participate in the conversations. Here are just some suggestions to help you get started:

On Twitter

Follow people and some will follow you.

• Use Twitter Search to look for folks with interests relevant to you
• Follow bloggers who interest you
• Follow some friends of your followers
• Follow who your followers follow

Ask questions

• One of the most useful words around is “help.”

Help others

• Take the opportunity to help someone solve a problem.

On Facebook

• Post status updates
• Comment on friends’ status updates
• Wish someone “Happy Birthday.”

On LinkedIn

• Post status updates
• Comment on your connections’ status updates
• Join LinkedIn groups
• Join discussions and post useful information
• Establish yourself as a thought leader by answering questions posted on LinkedIn’s Answers section.

The key to social media success is participating in the conversations. Reach out to others and they might surprise you. Go on. Get off the bench, out of the sidelines, and join in!