Image by Yann Ropars via FlickrResearching and placing select keywords is vital in ensuring that your paper resume rises to the surface. Media resumes are no different. Here again, it’s about creating exposure for you and your background.
Part of this depends on how you structure your social media resume. You might make it a standalone single page like your traditional resume, or you could break it into specific sections (skills, certifications, references, achievements, markets worked in, products sold).
Breaking it into different sections can allow you to target and optimize specific keywords around related content for each page. Conceptually, this is very similar to optimizing individual websites and pages in order to drive traffic and rank high in search engines.
What does optimizing do? When done properly, this type of targeting can help these separate pages rank higher up on search engines when someone searches for you and specific keywords. This can help more employers and recruiters find you, resulting in more potential job opportunities. Try using two to three related keywords per page and its related topic.
Thus, if you have a single-page social media resume, you’ll be limited to using just two or three keywords. Also, they’ll likely have to be of a more general, broad nature. This can make optimization-and thus visits from interested parties-more challenging.
Make Your Social Media Resume Easy to Share
You have little to no control over which specific people visit your social media resume. However, if they’re looking for your skills and have potential interest in hiring you-even if they are only influencers in the hiring process-you want to make it easy for them to spread the good word about you by sending your resume along.
That’s right: It’s about further improving your odds. Doing all the little extra can add up to a bigger competitive advantage for you:
Set up reciprocal links to and from various social media vehicles and tools.
Put a small form on your social media resume that allows people to email/forward your resume to interested parties.
Get the URL of your social media resume listed on as many networking sites as you can manage. Interest in your skills and experience can come from anywhere. Sometimes leads come from downright obscure and implausible places . Don’t knock anything until you give it a try.
The cool thing with web pages-and having your own URL is one of those-means you can capture all sorts of neat information in the form of statistics you can use to your benefit in your search activities.
You can then use this info to help refine your online marketing activities. Are the right people looking for you and finding you? Are the keywords you are optimizing having the desired impact? Are your tactics helping improve your online visibility? The stats will give you plenty of insight here.
The fancy name for this is “website/page analytics.” Basically, this mean using a simple statistical package that often comes with web-hosting services to allow you to find out the answers to the aforementioned questions along with other interesting tidbits of information:
Number of visitors who come to your social media resume
What pages your social media resume links to and what pages are linking back to it
Keywords used to find your social media resume
Web analytics can be complex. But if this is an area that interests you, doing more targeted keyword searching on the topic can help you find educate yourself about it.
