Your Ship Has Come In; 5 Tips for Landing a Social Media Career

It’s almost tough to remember life before social media: we had to call our friends rather than tweet them and we had to mail birthday party invitations rather than create events on Facebook. These days, we watch YouTube videos just as much as we watch regular TV shows, and we read snippets of news on Twitter in real time rather than in the newspaper each morning. That said, social media has truly transformed our lives.

5 Helpful Tips for Scoring a Job in Social Media

Social media is an excellent way to market yourself during a job search, but it’s also become a job in itself. Careers like social media strategists and online community managers did not exist as recently as a decade ago. If you’re a social media junkie—with or without a background in traditional marketing—a social media career could very well be your dream job. Here are five tips that could help you land a job in social media:

1. Make sure you have accounts on all social media platforms.

Foursquare and Google+ and Pinterest, oh my! (Yes, there’s more to social media than Facebook!) Social media has truly taken the world by storm and if you’d like to reach the end of the rainbow, you should have accounts on all platforms and understand how they work.

2. Optimize your own social media accounts.

When you tell a potential employee that you’re a social media guru, you better be able to back yourself up. A YouTube channel with one thirty-second video clip that you made three years ago and a LinkedIn profile that hasn’t been updated in ten months aren’t good signs. Keep your accounts fresh and active.

3. Be social (duh!)

When it comes to social media, one of the most important things to do is … well … be social! Interact with other people. Respond to their status updates and tweets. Have online conversations with them. People want to be “heard,” so start listening.

4. Brand yourself and showcase that brand across all of your social media accounts.

Whenever possible, use the same account name on all social media platforms. At the very least, choose usernames that are very similar. Other people won’t be able to put two and two together if you’re known as BroadwayGirl on one site and WorkoutFanatic on another. It’s also a good idea to use the same picture of yourself as your profile picture across all social media networks.

5. Use social media to help others.

Love cooking? Start a cooking blog and share your recipes with your readers. Are you an avid scrapbooker? Take pictures of your layouts and tweet them to your followers. Stay involved in your favorite hobbies and passions and use social media to spread the word across the globe. You want potential employers to consider you an expert!

Utilizing your social media skills for an employer will be slightly different than updating your own accounts for fun, but your workday will seem to go by so much faster if you have a job that you enjoy. Follow the advice mentioned above and your ship will be here before you know it!

Michael “Big Mike” McCaffery offers dish network deals and enjoys helping people find jobs in the technology industry. If you would like to connect further, check out his LinkedIn page.