Social media has become an integral part of the personnel sourcing and job hunting process. Today, more and more companies rely on the Internet to research the candidates (including outside consultants) they plan to hire. This makes it important to take a strategic approach when it comes to building your online reputation. Effectively leveraged, social media can help you create a strong personal brand and widen your reach across a wide array of job markets, industries, and organizations.

While there are many social media platforms that can help you build your network, there are two that all professionals should definitely consider and keep up to date – Google+ and LinkedIn. While the latter has now become synonymous with job search / hiring, the former can help you establish a strong online presence that you can leverage to enhance your reach. These two platforms alone can help you build a relevant network, and create and exchange information and ideas to give shape to your personal brand as a professional.

Linking Via LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become the most popular professional network in most parts of the world. Clearly, it has several advantages over traditional job portals thanks to its social media strengths and the fact that it is primarily driven by quality content.

LinkedIn allows its members to connect with each other. You can connect with like-minded individuals from the same profession and explore available job opportunities through this network.
It is a handy research tool. Most companies worth their name are present on LinkedIn with specialized digital marketing teams continuously generating content or strategizing to make their presence felt online. You can utilize this content along with inputs from your network to research a potential employer and their business before an interview.
You can identify the people that matter. Within minutes, LinkedIn can offer you insights into who the key persons in your area of interest are at a company you want to work with—as an employee, as a vendor, as a business partner, and so on. You can connect and engage with them to explore the possibility of a potential opportunity in their company.
You can build credibility. Your profile provides details about the people in your professional network, the companies you have worked with, and the capabilities you bring to the table, among other factors. Features like endorsements and recommendations add even greater credibility to your profile.

How To Make The Most Of LinkedIn?

Develop your LinkedIn profile like you would your resume. Highlight your strengths and capabilities early in your profile page.
Create interesting content and share it with your network. This will help establish you as a subject matter expert. The more original content you post the greater the benefits, including search engine rankings.
Build your network. Identify people within your industries of interest and connect with them. Join relevant groups and make your presence felt within these micro-networks.
Post regularly on various forums and comment on topics that can demonstrate your expertise and show that you have a unique perspective on matters of interest to your network.
Use the right keywords while building your profile and even while posting in forums. This will help both, your search engine rankings and your association with certain specific skills and capabilities.
Let’s connect Luke Middendorf – LinkedIn

Enhancing Your Online Presence With Google+

Where do we all go when we want to search for information?

Google. Where else? No other search engine today comes even close. A strong presence on Google+, is therefore, a definite advantage. However, as Google says, Google+ is now more than a social media platform. It has integrated various other offerings from the Google stable such as YouTube, Google+ Communities, Hangouts, Google Local and Reviews, Google Analytics, Google+ Ripples, and Google Mobile to provide a single window platform that can have a significant impact on your SEO.

How can you take advantage of Google+?

Build a profile page on Google+ to let Google know of your existence. While there is no stated preference, there is enough evidence to show that Google does favour content hosted on its products when throwing up search results.
Create backlinks to your blog, website, and LinkedIn pages using Google+. Also ensure that these links can be shared by those who visit your profile.
Upload content and make it shareable on Google+. The more shares you can manage the better it is in terms of SEO for your profile.
Build the right connections. The Circle function offered by Google+ helps segregate your contacts. This is a valuable tool you can use to employ targeted messaging and relevant communications.
Let’s connect Luke Middendorf on Google+, WSI Connect 0n Google+

Contact WSI Connect to help you plan and leverage social media for businesses. WSI Connect is a digital marketing agency located in Concord, CA. We service the San Francisco Bay area and help our clients grow their profits through strategies such as search engine optimization, online advertising, website optimization and social media.

Leverage Google+ For Your Local Business

Google+ Local helps people who use Google+ to discover more about their local neighborhoods and the businesses that they can frequent when it comes to becoming loyal customers of local small businesses. For companies and small businesses themselves, too, this site provides a good resource to dive in and build an online reputation to improve business and create loyal, local customers.

Google+ Local allows you to integrate everything in front of you when it comes to learning more about companies and what they offer, as well as seeing pictures, reviews, customer experiences, and more, all in a sharing and social setting that can promote a good deal of conversation and more among people and business owners.

For business owners, it’s absolutely critical that they are on Google+ Local so that they can interact with customers and react to customer reactions and complaints. Business owners can use Google+ Local as a phenomenal forum through which they can attempt to help customers and make bad experiences right again, as well as through which they can see to it that customers have and hold good experiences with their companies and more.

Customers have consistently used the site to publish photos and reviews of their favorite places, and to interact with others about hot places and good ideas around businesses locally. It’s imperative then, that businesses understand this power that the customers have and work to make it so that these customers are the businesses’ biggest fans and evangelists across the board.

Businesses need to jump aboard Google+ Local and use it to monitor people’s reactions to their products so that, if necessary, they are able to react to these issues and convert customers who otherwise might be skeptical or concerned into loyal evangelizers who can recommend your business to other people.

In turn, too, this site can greatly influence local search results as Google continues to be the king of social media. If you, as a business owner, have bad reviews and angry customers on Google+ Local, it’s likely that other customers will quickly and effectively find those reviews on basic Google searches. In turn, then, that can quickly and irreparably damage your business a great deal.

The satisfied and potential customers are all out there online, and they are going to talk about your business whether you like it or not. Whether it is a good experience or a bad experience is up to them and their reactions; in turn, though, it is shown on Google+ Local as an example of your business, and it may taint the customer pool if you are not careful with your customer service and your understanding of the Internet itself.

In turn then, it becomes more critical now than ever to understand how this can affect local search results, and what you need to and ought to do to ensure that you keep and host good reviews on the social site so that local people are convinced to try your products and more in due time.