Job Search and Social Media Part III: Free Tools

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A job search is a marketing campaign, and as such these free, online opportunities provide search engine benefits and branding opportunities for any marketable product or service.

www.LinkedIn.com. For more about LinkedIn, please read Part II of this series.
www.15SecondPitch.com. This tool helps you craft your “elevator speech.” Tip: Do this one first. You might decide to use the verbiage in a profile you’ll create on another network. Also, the site has powerful SEO, so when your name gets searched, your recent activity on this site will shoot to the top. If you do this, then build or update your profiles on the other services listed here, the newer, more powerful and representative content will push this down.
www.Plaxo.com. I just restarted my Plaxo account after abandoning it. One of my social media time management themes is, “You can’t be everywhere, so don’t try,” and I wasn’t keeping my Plaxo account current because everyone to whom I was connected on it was an overlap from LinkedIn and/or Facebook. That said, professionals I respect keep urging me to give it another go, so at least for the moment I’m back at it. I’d love to receive some comments to this post on why you use and like Plaxo, or don’t.
www.Meetup.com. Unlike other Internet social networks, Meetup is overtly focused on local, face-to-face meetings. There are networking groups in your area that would love to have you, might be free or virtually free, and the more savvy ones are using Meetup because of its reach and very cool scheduling and RSVP system.
www.Facebook.com. Well-founded concerns exist about using a tool with such a casual culture for professional relationship development. Segregating your “Friends” and customizing your Privacy Settings can mitigate your exposure, but the only real answer is to be on your best behavior. Networking and introductions can happen rapidly on Facebook, and since the first rule of being unemployed is, “Tell everyone you are available and looking,” it doesn’t make sense to exclude the world’s most popular and fastest-growing network.
Niche networks for your genre. For example, IT professionals collaborate on www.dice.com. Traffikd.com keeps a list of them. Traffikd keeps a pretty impressive list of all the big social networks.
Twitter and Blogs. While there are some methods for finding openings on Twitter—for example, perform a search for #colojobs on www.search.twitter.com to get an update on some openings in Colorado—but the real opportunity here is to build a content inventory for yourself, to show potential employers that you don’t sit idle, that you are, in the strictest sense, a professional.
Google Profile and Yahoo Profile. More food for the webcrawlers. When your name gets typed into a search engine, you want to own that space. You’ve already written your profile and you have an updated résumé, so put your info here, too.
www.VisualCV.com. Ditto. Increasingly, if incorrectly, the term curriculum vitae is being used interchangeably with résumé. VCV users can post documents and videos and you can easily upload your profile info from LinkedIn. Site services include résumé building assistance, recruiting and certification/testing assistance.