Strategic Social Networking: Finding Influencers
When you become sick of blindly applying for job openings you may turn your efforts towards networking. You may not have the opportunity to network in person with the key people you identify and then target so here are some tactical ways for finding influencers through social media.
LinkedIn
If you aren’t sure who you should be connecting with on LinkedIn, take a look at the jobs you’re applying for. You want to connect with anybody you can at that company and ideally the person either in charge of hiring or who would be your supervisor if you got that job. You can do some detective work and if a job listing for ABC Company says you will report to the Creative Director, do a people search in LinkedIn for someone with that job title at that company. You can connect with people several ways.
1. Groups – if there is someone very important you want to connect with try to see what groups they are a member of, which is sometimes publically listed at the bottom of their profile. Join one or several of these groups, then after you are a member you can request to connect with the same person and list the common group as how you know them.
2. In Mail – for those on LinkedIn paying more for their account, you can message them without being a connection through InMail. Sometimes a person will also list their actual email in some part of their profile so keep your eyes peeled for this too.
Take an extra 10 seconds and customize the request to connect message so it includes their first name and 1 sentence like. “Sam, I’m looking to connect with other healthcare IT experts like yourself. Thanks, Tina”
Twitter
Find the key influencers you want to reach out to on Twitter. If you already have been doing this on LinkedIn, you’ve saved yourself some work because you can find all the Twitter handles of your 1st connections and follow them. But you don’t want to stop at passively following an important person, you want them to engage with you and hopefully follow you back.
Before you mention them for the first time do some research.
1. Look at what they’re talking about in their stream. If there are links, click on them.
2. Go to the website they have listed in their bio and poke around. If it’s a blog, read a few posts.
3. Try to find more trivial facts about them like what they do for fun, their dog’s name, what sports team they cheer for and what restaurants or bars they check into on FourSquare.
Now you can mention them with a question about one of the links they shared, a recent blog post, or how they enjoyed the food at the Mexican restaurant last night. This gives you a much better chance of engaging with them.
Above all never ever directly ask a stranger for a job, this is a huge turn off and will hurt you more than never reaching out to them at all. Let people get to know you first, and provide them with value by helping them with something or sharing relevant content. After you have built this relationship then you have earned the right to ask for something in return.
Check out this post for more networking tricks.
If you aren’t sure who you should be connecting with on LinkedIn, take a look at the jobs you’re applying for. You want to connect with anybody you can at that company and ideally the person either in charge of hiring or who would be your supervisor if you got that job. You can do some detective work and if a job listing for ABC Company says you will report to the Creative Director, do a people search in LinkedIn for someone with that job title at that company. You can connect with people several ways.
1. Groups – if there is someone very important you want to connect with try to see what groups they are a member of, which is sometimes publically listed at the bottom of their profile. Join one or several of these groups, then after you are a member you can request to connect with the same person and list the common group as how you know them.
2. In Mail – for those on LinkedIn paying more for their account, you can message them without being a connection through InMail. Sometimes a person will also list their actual email in some part of their profile so keep your eyes peeled for this too.
Take an extra 10 seconds and customize the request to connect message so it includes their first name and 1 sentence like. “Sam, I’m looking to connect with other healthcare IT experts like yourself. Thanks, Tina”
Strategic Social Networking
Before you mention them for the first time do some research.
1. Look at what they’re talking about in their stream. If there are links, click on them.
2. Go to the website they have listed in their bio and poke around. If it’s a blog, read a few posts.
3. Try to find more trivial facts about them like what they do for fun, their dog’s name, what sports team they cheer for and what restaurants or bars they check into on FourSquare.
Now you can mention them with a question about one of the links they shared, a recent blog post, or how they enjoyed the food at the Mexican restaurant last night. This gives you a much better chance of engaging with them.
Above all never ever directly ask a stranger for a job, this is a huge turn off and will hurt you more than never reaching out to them at all. Let people get to know you first, and provide them with value by helping them with something or sharing relevant content. After you have built this relationship then you have earned the right to ask for something in return.
Check out this post for more networking tricks.
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