Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

Google isn’t perfect when it comes to searching the social web during a job search 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. These search engines specifically search out the different social media sites and tell you (or a prospective employer) who’s saying what about you.

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. So if you have a few extra minutes to use these sites and be doubly sure that your reputation is up to snuff, you should do so.

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 a thorough analysis.

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 search 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.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Joshua Waldman, MBA, is an authority on leveraging social media to find employment. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Mashable, and the International Business Times. Joshua's career blog, CareerEnlightenment.com, won the About.com Readers' Choice Award for Best Career Blog 2013. Joshua presents keynotes, trainings, and breakout sessions around the world for students, career advisors, and professional organizations.

This article can be found in the category: