Allison Harper

When did you last Google yourself or update your profile on LinkedIn? Whether you’re job hunting or gainfully employed, you should be regularly checking and maintaining your online persona.    It should be complete, relevant and consistent between platforms. You wouldn’t send a recruiter a half-finished resume or a business journal a half-finished bio, so make sure that you’ve carefully completed your online profile. By filling out each section you’re maximizing your chances of showing up in search results.

Beyond LinkedIn, which I talked about in depth in my post, there are thousands of platforms, networks & forums where you can create a profile. Choose three to start with: one large professional networking website (in addition to LinkedIn), one niche forum or network relevant to you, and one other ‘personal outlet’ (e.g. a blog or twitter profile). So, if you’re in sales, the large networking site you might go with is data.com. Your niche forum, assuming you’re in medical sales, could be medmasters.com. For your personal outlet, you can join a Facebook group for medical sales professionals.

The idea is to spend time thinking about how you want to be perceived. Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and message boards, our names, profiles and resumes are out there for the world to see. Once it’s on the Internet, it can never be deleted. An employer or customer can learn a lot about you in just a few minutes of surfing the web. What do you want them to know? It might be time to take down those Facebook photos of you drinking shots at your high school reunion.

The wide variety of platforms allows room to be creative, but keep every profile relevant and appropriate to the situation. The most important guideline is that your creative use of social media should be organic to you. Just because someone else can pull off putting her face on a billboard and saying "HIRE ME" doesn't mean you can. Maybe what's more your speed is taking that love of books to a new level by sponsoring a reading by a local author and inviting the CEO, who you know is on the board of the Library Foundation?

It can be overwhelming to think about the multitude of ways to use social media platforms, but if you discipline yourself by focusing on just a few of them, you can reap the benefits of these tools. Hootsuite is a great app that allows you to schedule posts or post to several platforms at one time. So if you want to share an interesting article about your industry, you can send it out to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at once.

The more time you invest in social media, in researching the key players in your field, and staying current with what your friends and associates are doing, the more you'll discover ways to be creative. But always stay true to yourself. Remember, getting noticed in a social savvy world means getting noticed for the right things.