Using Social Media to Promote Yourself

Guaranteed that if you’re a student, that you already use social media a lot just for casual use. But you can utilise social media in a business or career sense to make you more visible to employers or to find jobs in general. So, in honour of #CareersFest2016 coming up next week and the title of this blog being one of the many talks/workshops happening I thought I’d give you a head start on this topic!

Like many people I’ve been using social media throughout being a teenager and into the world of adulthood, so it would be safe to say that I’m fairly knowledgeable in how you can use social media. You might be fairly knowledgeable too, so who knows all this information might be obvious to you! But you might find out some more stuff you didn’t know about using social media to promote yourself.

via GIPHY

First of all, lets see how you can use Twitter:

• You might already have a Twitter account that you regularly use, but you might not have the most professional username. Particularly if you have a fan account for someone, potential employers aren’t going to take someone seriously if they have the username @harrystyleslover23! Or even if you have a general account, people won’t take you seriously if you have the username @joebloggsxoxo.
• From that it’s a lot better for you to create a new account with a username that is literally just your name, and to follow people in the industry or sector that you’re interested in working in
• Particularly if you’re a creative, use your account to share what you’re working on and general work that you’ve done as well
• You can even use Twitter to search for jobs! Often people who work for companies will tweet out saying that they’re looking for somebody to work in X position in a certain location with a link or contact details. Some people will use hashtags too so it doesn’t hurt to search for them either!

Next up is a social media platform that you might not have come across is LinkedIn:

• Now I actually haven’t used this website that much – I’ve only gone as far as making an account and adding a few little details to my profile.
• But the basic idea is that it’s sort of like an online version of your CV. You add all your education, past work experience and other skills that you have.
• Then employers will put out that they’re looking for a certain position or people who have certain skills
• You then use the skills and experience you’ve put on your profile to search for those jobs that are looking for the skills and experience that you have
• You can also connect to your Facebook so you can add your Facebook friends on LinkedIn too, and you connect with people who go to the same university as you too!

As I’m in a creative subject social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are also very useful to share your work or promote yourself:

• On both sites you can create pages and accounts dedicated to sharing your work
• Facebook is particularly good for getting business as you can promote your page as a sponsored post and people can directly message you asking for commissions/requests
• With Instagram, posting your work is good for gaining a following as that will make you more visible to others and for some employers it will seem more impressive if you have a lot of followers on social media.
• That is a slightly unfortunate thing about employment in this day and age as it can seem like your employment is just based off popularity, but it’s something that you do kind of have to accept and it’s not always guaranteed that people will get picked over the amount of followers they have!

This is just about scraping the surface of how you can use social media to promote yourself but hopefully you gained something from it. If you want to learn more you can go to the talk about this exact topic during #Careersfest2016 starting on 7^th November! Check out the CV competition you can enter below: