I did a session for marketing students on how social media can help them get a job.
Recent marketing graduates typically have very little (or no) job experience in the job that they are applying for. So, they really need to find ways of showing their skills and motivation to potential employers. The good news is that social media can help them with that.
I adapted (i.e., shortened) that presentation and produced a short video with the key themes covered in that session. I hope you find it useful.
Let me know your hints and tips, in the comments below.
Ana Canhoto 
Great tips. I would also add that it’s good to carefully craft your bio for sites such as Twitter. And provide a link there. Maybe to linkedin, or to about.me.
Also, especially for those in marketing, I think it’s important to use apps like Instagram and Vine and follow potential employers there. Just to understand what they are doing, and what these social networks mean in terms of marketing effort.
Another tip I have, is to try and figure out which social networks people in a company or industry you like to work for are using. For example: you can use YouTube to upload and share videos, but for more creative industries or companies, Vimeo might be the video-social-network of choice. If the companies you want to work for use Vimeo more than YouTube, you should as well. And don’t rule out Google+. I see it more and more in advertising and on sites.
In short, I guess, my main tip is standard marketing practice: figure out where your audience is, and focus your social network activity there.
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Great tip about the specific platforms (Vimeo vs YouTube, for instance). I had not thought of that! Thank you.
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With the risk of slightly going out of scope, I was thinking about your post a bit more, and it seems to me that social media can be used very well to engage with a company before applying for a job. I thought of three examples. First, I used to work at Capgemini, and we were quite proud of our award-winning corporate technology blog. Finding this blog, reading it and taking part in the conversation in the comments can be an excellent way to build your network. Most of the bloggers also are on Twitter, so you can easily extend the conversation there. See what they share, read what they read, and build a great set of conversation topics for cover letters.
Another example would be IDEO. In their application procedure they specifically ask if you are active on their open innovation for social good platform OpenIDEO. If you know that, you can participate there, build skills and network and also have conversations with key IDEO people.
Third example is Finnair. Their QualityHunters project is a great way of getting to know the company, what their challenges are and engage with some key people within the company. From there, it’s not a far step to find out that their social media manager dreams of making the company the most tweeting airline in the world. Responding to that by sharing some ideas of how to achieve that, is likely to be helpful in a job application.
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Another great tip, Arjan. Thank you!
When I made the presentation to our students one of them was worried that following staff on Twitter, or joining a LinkedIn group or, as you say here, join specific platforms might be deemed as stalking. But it is very much the opposite.
Thanks.
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