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.

Marketers to Increase Digital Marketing Spend in 2014

Most companies will be giving their digital marketing a boost in 2014, as new research from ExactTarget reveals that two thirds of marketers plan to increase their investments in digital marketing this year.

The study found that 61 percent of marketers plan to increase their investments in data and analytics, 60 percent plan to increase spend on marketing automation and 58 percent will spend more on email marketing. In addition, 57 percent of marketers say they will invest more in social media while another 57 percent will increase their investment in content management.

Additional insights from the ExactTarget study reveal that the top priority for marketers in 2014 is to increase conversion rates, followed by increasing and improving brand awareness and collecting, measuring and using behavior-based data.

“We are in the third wave of the Internet revolution where everything and everyone is connected; this is the Internet of Customers,” said Scott Dorsey, chief executive officer, ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. “As the number of connected devices and mobile phones continue to skyrocket, marketers are investing aggressively in digital to connect with their customers in entirely new ways across every channel and every device.”

Social Gestures and the Social Web – Part I

FROM the Below Article was Copied from the website http://blog.engag.io/2012/04/15/social-gestures-and-the-social-web-part-i/

The Original Author – MR.  William Mougayar

Social Gesturing is at the heart of the social web. Those little signals have a small footprint but a large impact.

The crowd-sourced nature of social gestures adds up to a lot of value. After all, Facebook with all its might was mostly based and founded on 3 basic social gestures: liking, sharing and linking, each taking a fraction of a second to accomplish.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hierarchy of social gestures in terms of value and potential.  And I came-up with the following way to organize them into a taxonomy where certain gestures are grouped with each other according to the objective they are meant to achieve and the purpose they target: People, Interests or Content.

The graph below is self-explanatory. The objective of social gesturing is to a) grab Attention, b) Express yourself, c) Curate interests (or content), d) develop Relationships, or e) Engage with people.

The most commonly used Social Gestures are Sharing, Linking and Liking when it comes to Content, and Following or Friending when it comes to People. But the area that holds the most promise is Engagement with People.

There is an ascending amount of time it takes to accomplish each gesture. If you look at the two extremes, Discussing something with someone is a lot more time-consuming than Clicking on content or Sharing it.

Personally, and for Engagio, I’m very interested in the gestures around Social Engagement. I think we’re just getting started in that segment, and I plan to cover more on that topic in Part II of this post.

In the meantime, what is your opinion on the following 3 questions:

• Are there other Social Gestures that you are seeing?

• Do you see new ones that are emerging?

• Which ones do you use the most?

Related articles

• Engagio: A Canadian Startup Story and the future of the Social Web (startupnorth.ca)
• Engagio wants to be your one-stop social inbox (gigaom.com)
• How to swear in Italian (afrahm.wordpress.com)
• Don’t Export Your American Hand Gestures [Infographic] (communicationstudies.com)
• ShadowPuppets prototype lets you pinch-to-zoom, click, and scroll with shadow gestures (theverge.com)

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.

Chat With Command Prompt

If you want personal chat with a friend

you don’t need to download any yahoo messenger
All you need is your friends IP address and Command Prompt.

Firstly, open Notepad and enter:

@echo off

:A

Cls

echo MESSENGER

set /p n=User:

set /p m=Message:

net send %n% %m%

Pause

Goto A

Now save this as “Messenger.bat”. Open the .bat file and in Command

Prompt you should see:

MESSENGER

User:

After “User” type the IP address of the computer you want to contact.

After this, you should see this:

Message:

Now type in the message you wish to send.Before you press “Enter” it should look like this:

MESSENGER

User:27.192.168.1.88

Message: Hello SoftIT!

Now all you need to do is press “Enter”, and start chatting!

Mobile Trading

The Procyon Holdings (PROHD) name is expanding again as we push out into another development area — the Android framework. When I abandoned my BlackBerry, the choice to move to the Android platform was an easy decision. Market saturation, the development community, and fluidity between devices make this platform shine.

I’ve been having a few end user problems with the current iteration of our trading website. First, the native Android Gingerbread browser lacks SVG support, an issue that has bewildered me since I read about it. I can solve this issue by using another browser such as Opera, but I would like to use the native one.

Also working with a HTML + Ajax website on a device with a touch interface feels like you are not getting the full user experience. I want to scroll down lists with my finder, click and hold to expose options, and speed around menus.

Mobile Architecture

We had to expand our design and create a few new pieces to get data to the mobile world. New items include the creation of a daemon to simply database population, exposing data via XML, and working with an existing library to enable Push notifications.

Information Flow

The Daemon runs on our server, periodically pulls transactions from the Eve API, and places that information in our wallet table.

Our previous design was that you would have to hit the transactions webpage and it would trigger an update. Getting a page to refresh on a desktop connected via broadband versus a mobile phone is quite the different experience.

Android has a framework called C2DM(Android Cloud to Device Messaging) which enables you to send lightweight push notifications to devices.

Our vision is that when a sell order clears, a large/special sale has occurred, or a significant milestone has been reached, we send a notice. This will be visible on phone’s Status Notification Bar and cause me to act if deemed important. I have been forgetting to buy or trade a particular item after the sell orders have cleared. Forget things — loose profit.

Getting data out of our database required the creation of a webservice to produce XML output from our wallet table.

Here is an example of the sale of one item in our XML feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>  
<TransactionList>  
<Transaction>  
<transactionDateTime>2012-04-19 06:21:04</transactionDateTime>  
<typeID>21096</typeID>  
<typeName>Cynosural Field Generator I</typeName>  
<quantity>1</quantity>  
<price>1948939.91</price>  
<profit>147803</profit>  
<stationName>STATION</stationName>  
<icon>21096_32.png</icon>  
</Transaction>  
</TransactionList>

Alpha Screenshot

This screenshot is our first proof of concept. We’re able to get information from an XML feed, display it, and get/cache images from the Eve image server. Major credit goes to my trading and corporation partner James, who has been doing the development work and educating me on the Android framework.

There is a lot we want to do with the mobile version. Menus, tabs, charts, reports, and the ability to add items to a shopping cart/wish list are all things on the drawing board.

Future Collaboration

This project is our first exposure to the Android framework and after the initial learning curve, we might perhaps coolabrate with the Aideron Robotics team on Aura. So maybe some of our trading mechanics will make their way into the Aura application.

Getting the Distance between Locations using Google Maps API

Modifying my post on drawing directions in a MapView using Google's API, I have come up with a solution to get the distance between two locations. Considering the same example I modified getDirections() to the method given below which returns distance as a string in kms(or meters).

public String getDistance(double lat1, double lon1, double lat2, double lon2) {
	String result_in_kms = "";
	String url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/directions/xml?origin=" + lat1 + "," + lon1 + "&destination=" + lat2 + "," + lon2 + "&sensor=false&units=metric";
	String tag[] = {"text"};
	HttpResponse response = null;
	try {
		HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
		HttpContext localContext = new BasicHttpContext();
		HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);
		response = httpClient.execute(httpPost, localContext);
		InputStream is = response.getEntity().getContent();
		DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
		Document doc = builder.parse(is);
		if (doc != null) {
			NodeList nl;
			ArrayList args = new ArrayList();
			for (String s : tag) {
				nl = doc.getElementsByTagName(s);
				if (nl.getLength() > 0) {
					Node node = nl.item(nl.getLength() - 1);
					args.add(node.getTextContent());
				} else {
					args.add(" - ");
				}
			}
			result_in_kms = String.format("%s", args.get(0));
		}
	} catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
	return result_in_kms;
}

How to get more page views for your blog

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: ”have you ever done X?”; “do you think Y is acceptable?”. You can read some more thoughts on how to build your audience  and how to get more comments.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas, as can the advice on how to get more traffic)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

Google to bring cheap Android tablets

The internet giant is reportedly set to launch a sub-Rs 10,000 tablet later this year.

Google has said that it will focus more on lower end tablets.

“There’s been a lot of success on some lower-priced tablets that run Android, maybe not the full Google version of Android, but we definitely believe that there is going to be a lot of success at the lower end of the market. It’s definitely an area we think is important and we’re quite focused on,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive officer, was reported as saying.

Currently, there are a lot of cheap Android tablets in the market but these are mostly from lesser known manufacturers.

Google’s direct involvement in low cost Android tablets could be revolutionary. In fact, the online giant is reportedly set to launch a sub $200 (Rs 10,000) device this year itself. The tablet is said to have a 7 inch display with Android 4.0 operating system, a quad core processor, and WiFi for internet access.

Social Media Integration

Spotify & Social Media

Spotify music applications offer easy integration with a large variety of different, popular social media channels. With their user-friendly applications, integrating your music lifestyle into your previously established social media channels is fairly simple. Such social media channels that your Spotify application can integrate with are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. As of this year, Spotify was completely redesigned in order to fully and completely integrate into both Facebook and Twitter accounts. The new application also has fully functioning/interactive applications, embedded into its database structure, such as last.fm, billboard.com, and Sounddrop.

Some of the key features of this fully-integrated platform offer sharing and tracking functions with your automatically-synchronized social media friends. Such functions include tracking what your friends are listening to, discovering  what sort of music and playlists are “trending”, as well as even  collaborating on shared playlists with other friends or users. These social media integration features have become such a vital part of this new social experience (i.e. Spotify) that new users are required to have a Facebook or Twitter account in order to complete registration of the service.

Last but not least, this marriage between Spotify and Facebook has also brought upon a little reverse-integration to the pairing. This reverse-integration comes from the recent addition and invention of a fully-functioning Spotify music application embedded on the Facebook website server.

6 Ways to use Facebook as Search Engine and Data Visualization tools..

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook Marketing is a topic we’ve covered for several years and with the significant increase in Facebook users there’s even more interest in how to make sense of what people do there. I’ve seen a significant increase in referring traffic from Facebook to web pages over the past 6 months and while a lot of that lift comes from marketing activities, I don’t anticipate the trend in Facebook users leaving to visit websites slowing down any time soon.

Participation on Facebook has traditionally been behind the login or confined to your network. With increasing amounts of content available “to the entire internet”, it’s worth exploring. Here are a few tools that you can use to search and visualize what’s happening on Facebook…

Booshaka – Facebook search. While there are a number of tools to search public Facebook updates, most notably openbook, I like the design of the search results on Booshaka the most. In the way that you might use search.twitter.com, you can use this search to uncover what people are saying about your brand on Facebook among other things. The difference of course, is that on Twitter you know what you post goes out to the world. On Facebook, I don’t think a lot of people have a handle on where their updates are visible. As a result, any outreach efforts must be carefully considered.

If you want to get creative with search and Facebook data, then check out the Facebook API Browser created by Google’s Ka-Ping Yee.

Like Button – This is a handy tool that shows you what people “Like” in Facebook terms. You can select pre-defined categories or you can add your own sites to track. When you identify a specific site, you can then drill down and see a longer list of all the popular items from that site that have been “Liked” or shared by your own Facebook network. If you want to see a “Like” vs. “Link” based search engine, this is a basic view.

Touchgraph Facebook Browser – This is the OG of Facebook network visualization tools, at least in my experience, and does a pretty good job of showing smaller networks. You can filter by network like cities or Universities and make other aesthetic adjustments. Your network can be displayed as images on the left or in tabular format. Apparently I am blue network deficient.

Social Graph – This Facebook application is is for visualization, not analysis. As with others, if you have a lot of connections, it will use a lot of processing power to render. You can modify the scale up and down and see profile pages of anyone you click on.

Friend Wheel – This is all eyecandy. The circle shows part of a social network and around the edge of the circle are 400 or so of my Facebook friends. If two of them are connected by a line, it means that they are friends with each other. If you have over a few hundred friends on Facebook, this is basically useless for insight but damn, it looks good on a Powerpoint slide.

Facebook Search – I think the internal search engine for Facebook has a ways to go, but it is getting more useful. The more information collected from external websites of Likes & shares on top of internal page use data, the more useful it should become. One question though, why does the Facebook search page need THREE search boxes? Why not have one search box and let the user pick what kind of search? I guess they have a ways to go on the search front, but you can be certain they’re working on it.

Some of these tools are certainly more interesting than others and if you know of any particularly useful Facebook data mining and search tools, please mention in the comments. As for the tools above, there’s entertainment and curiosity value in some of the visualization tools and the search tools can yield some very interesting information.

Here’s an interesting poll question for you: Do you think Facebook search tools that leverage public data are an invasion of privacy for those Facebook users that don’t know how or haven’t bothered to update their settings?

Facebook Marketing is a topic we’ve covered for several years and with the significant increase in Facebook users there’s even more interest in how to make sense of what people do there. I’ve seen a significant increase in referring traffic from Facebook to web pages over the past 6 months and while a lot of that lift comes from marketing activities, I don’t anticipate the trend in Facebook users leaving to visit websites slowing down any time soon.
Participation on Facebook has traditionally been behind the login or confined to your network. With increasing amounts of content available “to the entire internet”, it’s worth exploring. Here are a few tools that you can use to search and visualize what’s happening on Facebook.

Booshaka – Facebook search. While there are a number of tools to search public Facebook updates, most notably openbook, I like the design of the search results on Booshaka the most. In the way that you might use search.twitter.com, you can use this search to uncover what people are saying about your brand on Facebook among other things. The difference of course, is that on Twitter you know what you post goes out to the world. On Facebook, I don’t think a lot of people have a handle on where their updates are visible. As a result, any outreach efforts must be carefully considered.
If you want to get creative with search and Facebook data, then check out the Facebook API Browser created by Google’s Ka-Ping Yee.

Like Button – This is a handy tool that shows you what people “Like” in Facebook terms. You can select pre-defined categories or you can add your own sites to track. When you identify a specific site, you can then drill down and see a longer list of all the popular items from that site that have been “Liked” or shared by your own Facebook network. If you want to see a “Like” vs. “Link” based search engine, this is a basic view.

Touchgraph Facebook Browser – This is the OG of Facebook network visualization tools, at least in my experience, and does a pretty good job of showing smaller networks. You can filter by network like cities or Universities and make other aesthetic adjustments. Your network can be displayed as images on the left or in tabular format. Apparently I am blue network deficient.

Social Graph – This Facebook application is is for visualization, not analysis. As with others, if you have a lot of connections, it will use a lot of processing power to render. You can modify the scale up and down and see profile pages of anyone you click on.

Friend Wheel – This is all eyecandy. The circle shows part of a social network and around the edge of the circle are 400 or so of my Facebook friends. If two of them are connected by a line, it means that they are friends with each other. If you have over a few hundred friends on Facebook, this is basically useless for insight but damn, it looks good on a Powerpoint slide.

Facebook Search – I think the internal search engine for Facebook has a ways to go, but it is getting more useful. The more information collected from external websites of Likes & shares on top of internal page use data, the more useful it should become. One question though, why does the Facebook search page need THREE search boxes? Why not have one search box and let the user pick what kind of search? I guess they have a ways to go on the search front, but you can be certain they’re working on it.
Some of these tools are certainly more interesting than others and if you know of any particularly useful Facebook data mining and search tools, please mention in the comments. As for the tools above, there’s entertainment and curiosity value in some of the visualization tools and the search tools can yield some very interesting information.
Here’s an interesting poll question for you: Do you think Facebook search tools that leverage public data are an invasion of privacy for those Facebook users that don’t know how or haven’t bothered to update their settings?

Related Articles

• 6 Facebook Search Engine & Data Visualization Tools (toprankblog.com)
• Booshaka – A New Social Search Engine For Facebook (seoservicesgroup.com)
• Search What’s Trending On Facebook With Booshaka (techcrunch.com)
• Facebook Testing Feature That Would Make it More Valuable for Search (webpronews.com)
• Facebook Adds News Search (readwriteweb.com)
• Facebook Search Now Displaying Top “Liked” Stories from Across the Web (mashable.com)
• Facebook Roundup: Search, Revenue, Traffic, Music, Plixi, Egypt, and Prineville (insidefacebook.com)
• How to find out what’s trending on Facebook (traveler2.typepad.com)
• Booshaka: Search Engine for Facebook Posts (arnoldit.com)
• Facebook adds ‘liked’ news stories to search results (news.cnet.com)

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!