By Kristen Abell
It seems like you can’t have a conversation these days without “Facebook” or “Twitter” or some other such site coming up in some way. There’s a good reason for this – according to their site, there are more than 500 million users on Facebook, and Twitter has over 100 million users and is still growing as of April, 2010.
What does this mean for college students today? Well, depending on how you look at it, participating in social networking can either be a career-builder or a career-buster. Since there’s so much out there now on how to kill your career by posting inappropriate or too-revealing information about yourself, I thought I’d suggest a few ways you might turn your social networking experience around and make it work for you.
How to Make Social Networking Work For Your Career
Find Your Twitter Niche
If you know what sort of career you want, or at least the field in which you want to work, why not take the time to seek out the top tweeters in that field and make sure to follow them? Even better, engage them – find some way to comment or add to the discussions they have on Twitter (make sure you do this in a meaningful way, though – randomly commenting back or just commenting back to get your name out there will show up as exactly that, and it will win you no admirers). If you are able to contribute to the conversation, there’s a good chance these folks will remember you when a job or an internship opens. This may give you a leg up on the competition. The same can be said about LinkedIn Questions – if you can find ways to answer the questions on here in ways that meaningfully contribute to the discussion or find innovative solutions to the problems posted, you are bound to make a name for yourself in your field of choice.
Start a Blog
This is also a way in which students can use blogging and vlogging to create a positive online reputation. Find a topic about which you are passionate, about which you have knowledge or expertise, then create a blog where you can express all of this. If you are better at speaking than writing, put your thoughts on video. Make sure you spread the information about your blog on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and anywhere else you can think of that it might be relevant. There are some great tools out there to assist you with this (Hootsuite, Networked Blogs, etc.). Then, make sure to check out the other blogs out there on similar topics and comment, comment, comment. You’ll make as much a name for yourself by providing feedback (and comment love!) to other bloggers as by having your own blog.
Watch Your Messaging & Tone
One of the other things to keep in mind when posting to Twitter and Facebook and any other site as a student or as an aspiring professional is the tone of your messages. Obviously, posting about how smashed you got last weekend = bad idea, but how else can you make sure that what you’re posting sends a positive message about yourself? Think about who’s reading your posts – do you know all of the people who are reading these? Do all of them get your sense of humor/sarcasm/general tone well enough that they’re going to be able to read those things in a written post? If you’re a student leader, and you write something disparaging about another student or a university office, how well does that reflect on your professional ethics? Can you imagine a professional in your field posting those types of things? (Or, perhaps more pointedly, can you imagine a professional you respect posting those types of things?). And please, please, please, consider double-checking your spelling and trying not to use text-speak in your posts – if for no other reason than this is a personal pet peeve of mine. I immediately tend to take someone less seriously who consistently does both of these things.
Stay Up-to-Date
Finally, if you decide that engaging in social media is the path you plan to take, make sure to keep up with it. Nothing is sadder than an out-of-date blog, Twitter account, or profile page. It immediately reduces your relevance and interest in you.
Good luck networking!
Kristen Abell is the Associate Director for Residential Life at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and provides support to the Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management on many things technology-related. She has provided training and programming on social media for the last several years, and she writes about technology and student affairs on her blog at kristendomtalkstech.blogspot.com.
