I like cats and I spend my weekends in mosh pits at concerts. My skills include liking things on Facebook, sharing pictures of my meals on Instagram and expressing my innermost feelings in 140 characters or less. Two years ago a family member by my same name was arrested on drug charges, and my management experience consists of letting the fast food restaurant I was at ten years ago be shut down for food safety violations.
Is that what your web presence says about you? If your entire online presence consists of social networking, you could be losing business and job opportunities. Your social network presence has the potential to sink your career due to unprofessional or distasteful updates, web searches for your name could turn up dating profiles, examples of poor work you have done in the past, or even unsavory results about people who share your name. All of these decrease the value of your online presence and can cause employment problems for you.
When you create a written resume, you are able to control the information the recipient learns about you. But most people who are looking for a professional employee today do not confine themselves to the information found in your paper resume. They turn to social media and search engines.
A well-tuned online presence can boost your marketability when looking to secure new work. When you use social media effectively, keep track of search results for your name, and maintain an eponymous website, you can use your online profile to its greatest effect and generate positive results for yourself and your business.
A major trend these days is treating your career as an entrepreneurial adventure. A recently-coined term for this is “careerpreneur.” When you are a careerpreneur, you bank on your own reputation as an expert and a professional in your field of work, independent of the good name of your past employment. Since the majority of people perform online searches before making decisions on which professional to hire for a job, it has become increasingly important to have a positive, professional online presence. This is your personal brand online.
People seeking your expertise are likely to search for your name first. A consistent search engine optimization effort for your website will cause it to appear above other results when searching your name. This allows you to give a great first impression. With a traditional resume you are limited to one or two pages of dry information about yourself. Your website turns your resume into dynamic content that can link out to more information about specific projects, display a full portfolio of your past work, and be expanded upon through blog and article posts about what you do. Your website can enable people to sign up for an email newsletter about your work or connect with you on Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks.
Your online presence isn’t limited to your website. Anyone who searches you will undoubtedly land on one of your social profiles, and it is online career suicide to undo your professional image presented on your website with undesirable content on social media. Once you begin to manage your online presence, you must continue to present a consistent image everywhere online. You can use social media to increase your website’s SEO by linking to it from your social profiles, using your online influence to grow your reach, and boost the best results about yourself.
Online profiles are far-reaching and include the potential for testimonials that express your strengths and accomplishments while encouraging others to share about you to further your goals of expanding the positive information about yourself on the Internet. Managing your online presence requires consistent effort, but it is made easy through modern tools and professionals who are available to help you build the online presence you want to have. Alliance Group International has a crew of experts who can help evaluate your online presence and suggest Internet marketing strategies that cover every facet of your marketing strategy from website creation to total branding packages and social media management.
While paper resumes still have a place in the modern business world, your online presence can hold far more sway over whether you are hired or not. It is vital to keep this in mind as you develop your website and social media profiles.
