Career Services Post #2

It's time to focus on the career searching side of things once again. I found some interesting tutorials and workshops about using LinkedIn and other social media to find a job and to further one's career development, done by a company called Top Dog Social Media. I chose two in particular to study: one about what they call Social Selling, and another about marketing oneself on LinkedIn.

The one about Social Selling interested me because I've always had a slight entrepreneurial side, and a big part of building any business is selling in one form or another. Selling using social media, according to the stats quoted in the workshop, can put a business significantly ahead of its competitors, both in the quantity of sales, and in the size of the contracts that are negotiated, as time goes on. One of the points from this lecture stood out to me as being particularly important is that prospecting for clients can be done in two ways. The first is the most obvious - searching them out individually. The second is equally important though, and that is to make it easier for potential clients to find you.

Speaking of being found, and particularly on LinkedIn, I also found some simple, actionable steps for marketing one's profile and being found by business prospects. Most of it seemed fairly common-sense, but the one that surprised me the most was the suggestion to put a video on your LinkedIn profile. A study by Forbes found that about two thirds of prospects clicked through to a vendor's website after watching their video. So, something like this can have a huge impact. These strategies that I've talked about are mainly used by business owners rather than those looking for employment, but they are certainly relevant in the event that my future career includes any entrepreneurial or business marketing aspects to it.