Since social media is the big thing, are you using it for your job search? If not, why not?

LinkedIn has in excess of 120 million users, 750 million Facebook users and 175 million Twitter users. Even if only 80% of those users are active, it is still a BIG number.

Mashable recently published this article – http://mashable.com/2011/10/09/recruiters-prefer-facebook/ about recruiters preferring Facebook to find employees even though LinkedIn is the “professional” network.

Use LinkedIn to follow companies, find jobs, and build your level of expertise. Facebook boasts their answer to LinkedIn called Branchout. You can ask your Facebook friends to join you in your professional network and receive recommendations. Twitter has post after post of jobs that you can find even if you don’t tweet yourself. Just go to search.twitter.com. Or find out the latest posts from both LinkedIn and Twitter by using LinkedIn’s Signal.

Remember, you can’t just create a profile and let it hang there on the web, you must work at it, as you must with any job search process. If you need to learn more about using social media, let me know. A couple of options that might help are one-on-one or small group LinkedIn workshops.

What are you doing with social media and your job search?