Social Media during Gradulthood. Part 1

This feels very much like a pointless BBC website picture.

Over the next couple of weeks or so, I’m going to be writing about how social media can be used during Gradulthood. I’ve written about this a few times before, but this time I plan to take a more in depth look at it, and find out, what should we be doing?

I'd estimate this blog gets around 50% of its hits from links posted on Twitter, and occasionally, on our Facebook accounts. We also started University just as Facebook hit these shores, so we're familiar with social media, and it's been a massive part of our adult lives.

This article will briefly look at the power of Twitter during Gradulthood (for more info, see 'Gradulthood Jobs: Twitter'), and in future articles in this series, I plan to write about the usefullness of online CVs, and I'm also going to blog, whilst I set up a LinkedIn profile (something I’ve been meaning to do for a while) to see what all the fuss is about, and let those of you who aren’t on it, know whether it’s worth it or not.

A lot has been written about Twitter recently, especially by the Guardian Careers Blog. They invited their followers, via a tweet, to approach employers they admire and, and see if they could get a job/some work experience with them via Twitter. The hash tag #twitterjobchallenge was used, and despite not being overly successful in terms of jobs offered, it highlighted the usefulness of this particular social network, and the ways in which it can be utilised.

Most people agree, that as a tool for finding jobs, it’s brilliant - and incredibly up to date. There are many Twitter profiles that are specifically set up to Tweet jobs in certain industries, as well as many companies who advertise their jobs solely on Twitter, or at least bring to our attention jobs that are advertised little elsewhere.

If you're planning to use Twitter as part of a job/new career search, bear in mind that your profile is very public, and should be used with this in min. Given some of the pictures I posted over the weekend on @gradulthood this may appear a little hypocritical, but I figured everyone was away from the office anyway...Your Twitter account is a great way to make first contact with a potential employer, as well as network within your industry, and in all honesty, what have you got to lose by having an account? Apart from hours of your life spent clicking 'new tweets' anyway.

It can also be useful to have an online CV in your Twitter bio, which I’ll talk more about in the next article in this series.