How Your Social Media Profile Is Holding You Back And What To Do About It
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Loading... - Blanca Cordova
- 16 Mar 2020
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In a recent poll conducted by Monster about half of the respondents perceived their social media as a job liability. So I reached out to the experts at Monster.com to get their thoughts about what’s behind this statistic, along with some advice for how to apply it.
Your social media profile can be a liability. It can impede your professional progress or even halt your career. Today, your personal brand has moved online. More and more, a person’s first experience with you is through your social media profiles and contributions. Before they ever meet you in person, they Google you and check out how you show up in bits and bytes. If you want to land the ideal job, or recruit great candidates, or build partnerships, or open the doors to new clients, you need to build a digital you that is both consistent with the real-world you and compelling to decision-makers and influencers. Errant social media profiles typically fall into one of the following categories
1. Inaccurate
Profiles that are out of date, completely inaccurate, or inconsistent with who you are in the real world will work against you. Eventually, those who view your profile will uncover the inaccuracies, and your personal brand will be tarnished. From your job titles to your worldview, inconsistencies among various social media tools are very easy to uncover. You need to ensure consistency across platforms. Remember, it’s important to be yourself – your authentic self – when participating in social media online. And, of course, you need to keep your profile content relevant and real.
2. Sparse
This means you don’t have enough information for people to understand who you are. It may mean you have no social profile at all, which means you don’t exist. Or it could just show that you don’t take social media seriously and are not a social savvy professional. Experts at Monster suggest that if you can’t dedicate the time to be active on a platform, then delete your profile entirely. Having a stagnant, inaccurate representation of who you are is worse than not using the platform at all. You don’t want to look like someone who just creates a profile without actually using it.
3. Overwhelming
This category refers to those people who look like social media is their full-time job. Everything that happens in their real world get shared in their virtual world – resulting in over-sharing and overexposure. People who view your profiles wonder if you are on social media 24/7, leaving no time to be productive on other projects. If you post photos of every meal you eat and every sunset you see, you fall into this category!
Monster’s advice: There’s such as thing as being too socially active. Going crazy by posting every little thing on every single platform is too easily seen as overdoing it. You want to be viewed as someone who adds value to the organization, not an attention hog.
4. Unbalanced
The goal of social media and building a digital you is that your overall presence has the right mix of personal and professional. People get to experience you as a person and see the value you deliver in your professional life. The right mix is essential to both creating connection and building credibility.
Monster experts put it this way: Your social profiles should be an authentic representation of who are you are. You want to showcase what you bring to the table from both your personal and professional life, not just what you think a hiring manager would want to see. “Human resources” refers to humanity, so sprinkle in as much personality as you can, such as what you like to do outside the office. “Institutional fit” is now one of the most important elements employers look for, so make it easy for them to organically get to know you outside of the short time allotted for an interview.
Take a look at your social media content and add your response to the Monster poll. As you build your social branding strategy, make sure you don’t fall into one of the categories describe above.
