1. How to Use Social Media to Become More Attractive To An Employer

2. Who am I? Publisher of the small press company Wannabe Press.
Host of the twice weekly podcast The Business of Art.
Consultant for entrepreneurs looking to move to the next level in their careers.
Branding Specialist.
Conference speaker.
Published writer.
General thing-knower.
So who am I?
How many of you believe me? Because I’m going to ask you at the end too and see if you still feel that way based on what we talk about. I’m going to show you my exact social media profiles and online presence to proof to you that using social proof and an online presence make me more hireable and knowledgeable.
Are you ready? So here’s my first question to you.

3. How qualified are you?
How qualified are you for your job? Because that’s what it’s about. Even if you are not hiring people you want to find the best person to give your money to. That’s why we go to Jiffy Lube. That’s why we go to McDonald’s. That’s why we go to Trader Joes. Because they are the most qualified companies to fulfill your needed.
How many of you think you are qualified for the jobs you have? What about for the jobs you want?
Awesome. That’s most of you. We’ll deal with the rest of you later. Now here’s my next question?

4. How does anybody know you are qualified?
Do you have a degree? Well that helps. But lots of people have degrees. And degrees sit on shelves. I haven’t seen my degree in a decade.
Do you have job experience? Even better, but tons of people have job experience. And lots of people are trying to get jobs in industries where they have no experience. How many of you want jobs in industries where you have no experience? Well your current experience isn’t gonna land you that new job.
So a resume and job experience don’t really help you very much. Even if you do have experience, do you know how long a hiring manager looks at a resume?

5. 8 seconds
8 seconds. And that’s on a good day. That’s if the hiring manager even gets your resume. Before that, a program usually runs to see if you have the right keywords in your resume to even qualify for an interview.
If you do get through to the hiring manager, your resume is one page. Do you think one page is enough to see if you are qualified? In 8 seconds did you think I was qualified? Probably because I’m standing up here.
Which is exactly the point. You want to give yourself the authority. You want to make people know you are an expert before you even step into the room.

6. 77 percent of employers will Google you before hiring
Did you know 77 percent of employers will google you before you walk into the door for an interview? If you get to the hiring manager, this is the best way to prove you should move to the top of the heap. To show them something amazing when they google you.
When they look at you online, you want them to see you know what you are doing and care about what you are doing. So here’s my next question…

7. What do you look like online?
What do you look like online? Have you ever checked? Do you ever run a google search and see what comes up? Do you have a Facebook profile? Do you have Twitter? Instagram? Do you have a blog or a website? How many of you know what you look like online?
I do. I know exactly what my profile looks like when you search my name. Want to see?

8. Here it is. This is a google search of me done from my computer
Here it is. This is a google search of me done from my computer. When you search my name, this is what comes up. Now, I am a writer, creator, and publisher. Do you think this appropriately indicates what I do?
The first result is my publishing company. The second is my amazon profile with all my books in it. The next three are my first three books. Then there are images which have me being interviewed, at cons, etc.
Now, does anybody think I’m not an expert in being a writer and publisher? Does anybody think that I can’t speak intelligently about writing, creating, or publishing books?
There is only one question employers will want to know before hiring you.

9. Are you the most qualified candidate?
Are you qualified? Do you know what you are talking about? Can you deliver? Do you care about the topic you’re interviewing for? Can you do the job? You only have one page, and let’s face it a very bland page, to convince people from your resume. But you have the entire internet to prove you know what you are talking about online.
Now let me give you a caveat here. I know you don’t have time for this. Nobody has time for this. But you make time because these short term time commitments lead to long term rewards. They help you get jobs, get promoted, and get noticed.
If you can prove yourself qualified, you’ll get the interview. If you can nail this this part, you’ll get the job. So how do we do that? How do we set up our social and online presence in order to make ourselves look good to employers? Let me show you my twitter profile.

10. Here it is: This is my twitter profile
Here it is: This is my twitter profile. You’ll see the first thing on it is my latest blog post. If you scrolled down you would see that I have tons of retweets and posts about creativity, business, art, and writing. I talk about my books. I talk about the books we publish. This profile has personality. It has my personality. It shows what a potential employer will see when they hire me, don’t you think?
People know from this what I can do, what they can expect, and who I am. Just by being on this site you know what you get from hiring me. That’s what you’re trying to do with your online profile. You want to show people what they are going to get when they interview you. You want your profile to make them SALIVATE to hire you.
How do we do this?

11. How Do We Make You an Expert?
So how do we make you an expert? How do we make sure you know what you are talking about, and are appealing to an employer? How do we make sure that when people look at your profiles, you will move to the top of the heap? Well first we have to show we are sharing relevant content that proves you are an expert in the industry.

12. How do you find information to share?
That’s easier said than done though. I mean, in a world of infinite information how do we find information to share? Especially when we are very, very busy. What I do is use an aggregator site like Buzzsumo. Has anybody used Buzzsumo before?

13. So this is Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo tells you the most popular shared content for specific keywords. You can see that I put in writing, and found all the ones that have been popular for the past year. These are already tried and true information that has been popular. You are currently looking at the best information the internet has to offer about a specific topic. So now all I have to do is share this information and it’s a great start to building my authority.
But you can’t share them all at once. You need to be active and dynamic. You need somewhere to schedule your posts to make it feel like you are posting all the time. We do this by using a program like Buffer. Has anybody used Buffer?

14. This is buffer. Buffer, or hootsuite if you prefer, allows you to schedule your social media to go through the week or month. This allows you to have a great base of information on your account that you can supplement with other articles and comments. You can spend an hour a week looking up information and scheduling it to update all week long. Once you have that set up, you want to move to the next step, which is commenting on the most popular stories of the day through your blog.
So you are already sharing great content, and you are able to see which ones are getting the strongest reaction. Now, you can take the most popular stories, and comment on them through your blog. A blog is a great way to build authority because you are commenting and giving your own highly professional analysis to an important situation in your industry.

15. This is my blog. It’s about business and art and how to make content
This is my blog. It’s about business and art and how to make content. I have moved past commenting on important issues of the day, because I’ve already built an audience who tells me the type of stuff they want to hear, but if you are getting started the easiest way to build authority quick is to comment on thing everybody in your industry wants to know.
You also want a few epic posts on your blog, those that can be shared forever, are 10,000+ words, and can show you know everything on a topic. A great rule is to start with five 10,000 word blogs in the first 45 days, and then you can supplement with smaller posts.

16. If you don’t like blogs, you can also do something like a podcast or a blog, but this is much more complicated to figure out. I didn’t start my podcast until I had been blogging for 7 years. However, it’s a great way to get in front of influencers in your industry, get them to talk about their lives, and make connections fast. I think the podcast has helped me more than the blog ever did.
Once you have these comments on your industry, you can buffer them throughout the week, and use a company called Tweet Jukebox to keep feeding information to your audience over and over.
That’s not all though. Just commenting isn’t enough to make your very desirable.
There’s another question you have to answer.

17. Who do you know?
Who do you know? The real value of social media is in meeting new people who can help move along your career. By having lots of great content, you will be able to contact influencer who can help you, follow them, and start to build a little audience for yourself. If you have a podcast of interview blog, you can help them first by providing the value of your audience. Then, you can put them in your rolodex for the future.
In order to be an expert, though, you need an audience. You need people who are looking at your content. You need people to share your content. Because once people are sharing your content, then it can expand out into new spheres of influence. Those new spheres of influence might just be your potential hiring manager.
Twitter and Instagram make this very easy, because you can tweet at people. You can also include links in your blog to influencer articles and they tweet at them about you blog post. The most your interact with your potential employers and influencers, the more value you provide, and the more knowledgeable you seem, the more likely they will be to connect and interact with you. Then, when you see that ideal job post, you will have an advocate in your corner.
Even if the hiring managers don’t have social media, they will have a linkedin profile. Linkedin is the best way to build your spheres of influence and find out who is the hiring manager for your job.

18. This is my linkedin profile
This is my linkedin profile. You can see in my title exactly what I do and exactly who I am. You can see my profile, my picture, and my summary. This allows me to more easily find great hiring managers and connect with them. I also use linkedin pulse, which is like twitter for linkedin.

19. This is linkedin pulse, which allows you to have a stream of information for people to find. Again, this is all about my podcast and my blog. It also has interesting articles on creativity and writing. That way when somebody looks me up, they will see who I am, and what I am about. Then, when I go to look for new connections, they will more likely say yes to my connections.

20. You can also search for people on linkedin once you have established yourself. If they are in your first or second tier you can actually see their name and whole profile. If they are third level connections you will have to work your way up the chain of command to find more about them. You can probably find somebody that is a second tier connection that they know, and then connect with them. The bigger your sphere on linkedin, the more information you will be able to find.
However, this is a move you make once you have a good online presence. Once you can prove yourself an expert, all of the rest falls into place.

21. It’s all about proving you are a professional.
Here’s the sum up. This is all about proving you are a professional. You want to build a rock solid internet presence that shows you know what you are doing and are an expert in the industry to which you are applied. If you do, people will notice and start treating you like an expert. You will be able to get more jobs and land more interviews.
Don’t forget that this is all very professional conduct. You need to make your content professional, and put private anything that is going to be risqué. You need to delete any tweets you might not want people to see. Facebook is the only one you might be able to get away with being personal, but as time goes on you will find that your facebook friends are part of your industry and that will end.

22. Questions?