What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.
How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.
Let me explain.
Whitney Parker is vice president for user experience at Brazen Careerist, where she co-hosts a bootcamp on how to create and implement a social media strategy.
It’s no secret that jobs in social media are becoming more prevalent in nearly every industry nationwide and even globally. A quick search on Indeed returns nearly 30,000 openings in the United States alone.
But what might not be obvious is what, exactly, young professionals should do to position themselves for these emerging roles. And no, it’s not enough just to have a Facebook Page.
In answer to the question above, approximately 18,400,000 Americans say yes, they got their current job through Facebook. Though Zuck’s platform ranks #1, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t have shabby numbers either — 8 million and 10.2 million Americans, respectively, have gotten their jobs through social platforms.
Judging from our Job Search Series, it should come as no surprise that being socially savvy pays off in the job hunt for two reasons — it helps you network, and it’s a highly marketable strength in your skill set, given all the openings in the digital space. So, it’s about time you spruce up those social profiles and start networking.
Gerrit Hall is the CEO and co-founder of RezScore, a free web application that reads, analyzes and grades resumes instantly. Gerrit has successfully combined his passion for computer science and the careers space by helping job seekers write the best resume possible. You can connect with Gerrit and RezScore on Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a slew of other social media platforms, job seekers are closer than ever to the decision-makers at their target companies.
While social media is wonderful as a stand-alone tool in any job seeker’s toolbox, you should know that it’s even better when combined with other “old-fashioned” standbys — such as your resume.
LinkedIn has acquired IndexTank, a provider of real-time hosted search technology, for an undisclosed amount. LinkedIn and IndexTank say that the acquisition will help improve LinkedIn’s internal search technology.
“LinkedIn has exploded over the past few years, and the search team has done a fantastic job at building world-class technologies to keep up with the growth,” IndexTank founder and CEO Diego Basch said in a blog post. “Of course, this doesn’t stop here and we’re working on the next play.” This growth will continue and perhaps accelerate.”
Despite the challenges social media presents for human resources professionals, it plays a growing role in talent recruitment. The big question, though, is where to find talent.
While employers continue to use professional networking site LinkedIn for recruiting, especially when hand-picking for executive positions, they prefer interacting with students and graduates via Facebook rather than LinkedIn, according to a study by online recruiting research lab Potentialpark.
Twitter’s 32% increase in traffic in 2011 is enough to see the network leapfrog LinkedIn as the number two most-visited social network overall, behind Facebook, says TechVibes, touting data from Comscore.
Twitter’s traffic growth has been tops amongst all social networks for the past three years. The site saw 32.5 million visitors in July, and is now the 34th most-visited site in the U.S., leap-frogging the stagnant LinkedIn (ranked 36th).
The deadliest sin of Facebook marketing is being boring. To gain fans’ attention and keep it, marketers need to create novel campaigns, or put a unique spin on familiar techniques. Otherwise, brands’ efforts are largely ignored or used by fans to score free stuff.
Google+ has signed up 13% of U.S. adults so far and could hit 22%, in a year, passing Twitter and LinkedIn as the number two social media network, according to a new study.
The report, based on a Bloomberg and YouGov poll of 1,003 U.S. adults from July 29 to August 2, revealed that 71% percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, but that number will drop to 69% a year from now. Among people who use both services, 30% say they plan to cut the time they spend on Facebook. However, 31% of Google+ users say they’ve abandoned their Google+ accounts or never posted anything on them.
According to the latest research from eMarketer, Facebook dominated the 80 percent of companies with 100 or more employees tusing social media in their marketing campaigns this year, as the social network was part of 93 percent of those campaigns.
Twitter was used in 78 percent of those campaigns, YouTube in 61 percent, and LinkedIn in 44 percent.
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