5 Essential Social Networking Tools For Job Search

If you’ve just begun your job search – or even if you’ve been at it a while- you’ve probably realized that there are a lot of social networking tools out there to help you with your effort. In fact, there are hundreds out there to choose from and sorting it all out gets a little confusing and time consuming.

Let’s be very clear about the purpose of social networking in your job search. When it comes to hiring, 27% of new hires come from personal or professional referrals, 12% come directly through job boards, with the remainder coming from recruiters, the company’s own website, etc. So where does social networking come in? For the past 6 years, those personal referrals and recommendations have increasingly come through online networks.

Here’s our list of the top 5 social networking tools that are essential in helping you manage your job search (and how to best use them):

Google Reader
Google Reader is not strictly a social networking tool – it’s more like a social organization tool. The idea here is to follow the blogs, company news and job feeds for the companies, recruiters and industries you’re interested in. If writing your own blog within your area of expertise is part of your search strategy, Google Reader can be used to pull in content in your subject area for post ideas, or to keep your thumb on what others are writing about. It’s also an essential tool for researching what’s going on at the organizations at which you have interviews scheduled.

LinkedIn
Unless you’ve been living in a cave over the past 4 years, you are likely well familiar with LinkedIn. Having a complete profile here is no longer an option, but a necessity. However, the importance of LinkedIn to your job search goes well beyond simply maintaining an up to date resume and set of recommendations.

LinkedIn is essential because it provides you with the ability to directly network with people (including recruiters) inside the companies you want to work for. The key here is in joining and participating in Groups within your field or discipline. There are literally hundreds of Groups in LinkedIn, (including CPGpeople); and once you’re connected in a group you can rapidly expand your personal network through your Group relationships.

Twitter
You may be scratching your head as to how this popular micro blogging site can help with your job search. Twitter is a terrific mechanism for driving traffic to your own content, and directly connecting you to companies’ job listings and to the decision makers and influencers with your target industries.

You may also want to look at a tool like TwitJobSearch, which is essentially a free job search engine specifically for Twitter. An increasing number of Job Sites, employers and recruiters are feeding their jobs through TwitJobSearch making your use of Twitter for this purpose easier and more efficient.

Facebook
Over the past several years Facebook has received some negative press in terms of its use for professional networking. However, that tide is definitely turning. The important thing here is to make active use of Facebook’s privacy control settings and to be mindful of who you “friend” and the nature of your Facebook content. Similar to your LinkedIn profile, use your real name (register it as a domain if you can), and a photo of you that reflects a professional appearance. Post original and curated content into your Facebook profile that reflects your professional interests. Minimize (but not completely eliminate) views of your personal life.

With Facebook, it is important that you understand how privacy settings work to avoid a collision between your personal and professional posts. One of the best posts we’ve read on navigating Facebook privacy waters is by Nick O’Neil. This post is about a year old at this point and the Facebook interface has changes since it was published, however, it is still very useful in helping you to understand how to use privacy settings.

Social Organization
This last ‘tool” is really a set of tools that can help make your professional networking efforts a bit easier to manage. As you can imagine, dealing with multiple sites, daily posts and tweets, and responding to direct messages, contacts and inquiries can quickly become overwhelming. Luckily there are a number of management tools out there to help.

TweetDeck and HootSuite are two very popular desktop applications that allow you to post and manage your social profile(s) across multiple applications including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Socialoomph (formerly TweetLater) offers members an extraordinary array of tools that enable you to not only manage multiple social networking accounts, but also find and contact key influencers within those social networks and within your area of interest through keywords.

All of this may sound complicated initially, but you would be surprised at how easy using these tools really are once you get started.

Finally, remember that drilling down and getting as close as you can to the influencers within your own industry and specialty are extremely important in managing your job search efforts online. Google “the best social networking sites for professionals,” and you’ll find a whole plethora of social sites specifically targeting numerous online communities in your field!

There are so many terrific tools to manage your job search online that we haven’t mentioned here. Got a particular favorite? Post it below, or DM us at http://twitter.com/ CPGpeople.