Take Advantage of Social Media Search Engines during Your Job Search

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

Search engines specifically search out the different social media sites and tell you (or a prospective employer) who’s saying what about you. Google isn’t perfect when it comes to searching the social web because it doesn’t deliver many results from real-time content such as Tweets, less-popular blogs, and frequently updated news sites. The danger is that these more obscure sites can still damage your reputation despite their lower Google rank.

That’s where social media search engines come in.

Social media search engines look at more recent content, unlike Google, which still takes some time (up to a week) to index and deliver results. A bad reputation is a tricky situation.

Find the social you on Social Mention

Social Mention searches the real-time web, which is online content posted recently, and the social web, which includes blogs, Tweets, news sites, review sites, and bookmarking sites.

Simply enter your name in quotation marks in the search field and choose All for the search. Within seconds, Social Mention delivers one of the most thorough analyses of your name you’ve ever seen.

As it’s performing the search, the Social Mention program judges the search query by four metrics: Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach. These dimensions are what Social Mention thinks are important for an online reputation. They’re clearly explained on the site when you hover your mouse cursor over your scores.

You also can see how frequently a mention of your name occurs. You can even see which keywords are associated with your name and on which types of media a mention occurred.

Finally, the Sources section clues you into which social network is talking about you the most. This information is great to have when you plan your campaign. If one network (or medium) dominates, then that’s a great place to start building content.

Check other social media sites for your name

Just for the sake of being thorough, here are a few other search engines you can use to see whether anyone’s talking about you:

Pipl: HR professionals commonly use this people search engine. Pipl's search results page is thorough and includes public records, social media mentions, and multimedia mentions (such as pictures, for example).
Twitter Search: This engine is a simple way to search Twitter’s real-time feeds to see whether your name has been mentioned. If you have a Twitter username, try also searching for that.
WhosTalkin: This social media search engine looks through blog sites, news sites, and other social media.

Repair a bad online reputation

If you don’t like the results that come up when you search for yourself online, you have a bad online reputation. You also have a problem if no results about you show up, good or bad. Many people with a poor online reputation feel helpless and angry and just don’t know what to do about it, but fixing this situation is far from impossible.

The answer to the problem is to simply bury the old, bad content beneath a barrage of new, good content. Or if you have no results, start building fresh content. Eventually the older search results will fall past the third page of Google and then into Internet obscurity. (Note: The worse your reputation is, the more work you have to put into rebuilding it.)