Scheduling Social Media Into Your Resume Writing Business

One question I get from resume writers quite frequently is: "How do I use social media to promote my resume writing services, without having it become a time suck?"

Social media is an activity that can require a large time investment. As a busy resume writer and career services business owner, you may not have an abundance of free time available for social networking. But being effective on social media doesn't have to take hours out of your day.One of the best strategies to maximize social media involves scheduling your interactions.

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Step #1 Establish Social Media Goals
What do you want to accomplish with your social media interactions and efforts? What's your goal? The goal needs to be measurable and timely. For example, instead of saying, "I want to increase my followers or fans on my Facebook business page" you might say, "I want to increase my page 'Likes" by 300 fans in three months" or, "I want to increase my Twitter followers by 10% by the end of the first quarter 2013." Knowing the specific goal you want to accomplish will help you direct the time -- and resources -- you spend on social media so you maximize your efforts.

Step #2 Create a Plan to Achieve Your Specific Goals
The next step involves some planning. You want to outline a step-by-step procedure to reach your goal. For example, if your goal is to reach 300 new fans in three months, you can approach it several different ways. One way might be to launch a "Like My Facebook Fan Page" promotion where you hold a sweepstakes and award the winner a free resume or LinkedIn profile update. This promotion will undoubtedly require some work on your part. Outline the steps you need to take to make it happen.

On Twitter, you can spend 10 minutes each day following new people — one of the best ways to get followers yourself is to follow more people, and engage with them so they follow you back!

You can also "spend your way" to new fans. You can set up a Facebook ad campaign and invest a couple of dollars each day towards growing your fan base.

Step #3 Pull Out the Calendar
Assuming you know how much free time you have in the day, the next step is to grab a calendar and start scheduling your social networking activities. If you don't know how much free time you have in a day, consider tracking your time for a week or two. If you are unable to complete your task list each day, you may need to prioritize and restructure some of your plans.

Taking a look at your calendar, break your social networking tasks down into small, manageable steps. Ideally, nothing will take longer than 30 minutes. It can be anything from accepting friendships on Facebook and sending each person a personal message (and inviting them to "Like" your business page) to scheduling your tweets for the week (I recommend Hootsuite for this!). Identify the task, put it on your calendar, and attack your plan in bite-sized pieces.

Step #4 Follow Through and Assess
Try to stick to your plan for a few weeks. Then step back and assess. What's working? What isn't? Are you still trying to do too much? Are you procrastinating on your social media goals? Are you getting distracted from your goal once you log on? (Block off 30 minutes on your calendar. Tell yourself you will spend the first 10 minutes doing "work" and the other 20 minutes doing "fun" social media activities.) If necessary, rework your plan so that it fits your needs and goals better.

Step #5 Celebrate Success
Evaluate your progress -- did you achieve your goal? (Put the goal deadline on your calendar to remind yourself!) Once you've reached your goals, take some time to celebrate your accomplishment. Then set a new goal and repeat the process. Scheduling your social media efforts gives them a purpose. It helps you grow your business without wasting your valuable time.

Do's and Don'ts of Content Curation

The final post in this weeklong series on content curation is the "do's and don'ts."

• No matter where you publish, always remember to add something of your own to the curated content. Just sharing a link on Twitter isn't content curation; neither is copying and pasting sections of someone else's article to your blog, even if you give them attribution. 
• Try using your curated content as the basis for explaining your opinions, giving insights on a new topic, or exploring the opinions of others.

Did you miss any of this week's blog posts on content curation? Check them out here:
Curating Content to Attract New Clients
Best Practices in Content Curation
Where to Find Careers Content to Curate
Five Great Tools for Content Curation

Working With Challenging, Controlling, or Just Plain Pain-in-the-A$$ Clients

There has been a great discussion going on about "controlling" clients on the NRWA E-List as of late. My favorite tip list was shared by colleague Kelly Donovan, CPRW.

Here, with her permission, is Kelly's list of "PITA Warning Signs":

• Asking for a discount or questioning whether the investment is worth it.
• Saying their project will be "simple" (the "simple" ones are always PITAs!)
• Saying anything that reveals doubt/skepticism about your qualifications
• Mentioning they had a problem with another resume writer (ask for details!) 
• Asking for a watered-down version of your services with a lower price tag (is it really something you can scale down?)
• Calling/emailing with unusually high frequency (sign of being high-maintenance or disorganized)
• Calling before 8:00 a.m. or after 7:00 p.m.-ish (unless for a scheduled call)
• Complaining about any aspect of their experience with you (your voice mail, how long you took to get back to them, etc.) 

I wrote a previous blog post on the subject of challenging and pain-in-the-a$$ (PITA) clients in 2008 that also contains some warning signs to be wary of: "We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists."

Kelly says when you encounter one of these warning signs, "trust your instincts and just say no. If they end up being a PITA, it won't be a profitable project regardless of whether you get paid (and keep it) or not."

Do you have other warning signs to share? Please add a comment!

Five Great Tools for Content Curation

As we've talked about in the previous posts in this week's blog series on content curation, as a content curator, your first and primary job is searching out valuable content that is relevant to your readers. The time you save creating original careers industry content will be spent hunting for it. While seeking the best content can be time-consuming, here are five tools that can help make the search easier.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts

Enter specific keywords and Google will send latest published content from everything it searches. Receive information via email or your Google Reader.

Google Alerts is a free service that lets you choose keywords and then tells you whenever new content has been posted using those keywords. You can find articles, blogs, stories, videos, and other content to share as soon as it has been indexed by Google. All you need to do is enter keywords and Google Alerts will either send you results via email or send them to your Google Reader account.

If you refine your Google Alerts keywords, you'll get more relevant results. One way to do this is to use quotation marks. When you search for 'interview preparation' rather than the terms interview and preparation separately, it will only bring up results where the exact phrase 'interview preparation' is used (and not every mention of the words 'interview' or 'preparation'). You can also use Boolean search terms such as AND, NOT, and so on to refine searches. (You'll find it takes some time to refine your Google Alerts to get the types of results you're looking for.)

Google Reader

Google Reader – http://www.google.com/reader

Organize your feed subscriptions so you can keep track of the latest content from your favorite sources.

Google Reader is a tool that lets you subscribe to certain blogs and websites. If you use Google Alerts, you'll start to see the same sites popping up again and again with content you can use. You can use Reader to follow these sites directly. Just like Google Alerts, Google Reader offers advanced search features that help you refine your search and cut down on sifting time.

There are a number of free and paid mobile apps that help you use Google Reader on your smart phone, such as Feedr and Reeder. These are great if you're searching for content on-the-go using your mobile device. You can quickly review your feeds and even share directly from within the app.

Facebook Lists
Facebook originally launched its Lists feature to protect users' privacy, but its Subscribe tool has made it a great way to search for content through this social media site. It works in much the same way as Google Reader, but everything is done through Facebook.

Journalists, bloggers, celebrities, organizations and others whose content your readers like may have a Subscribe button on their profiles. When you subscribe to their page it adds their news to your feed. You can then customize those settings to make sure you're getting the content you want.

Twitter
Twitter makes it easy to find content by searching for keywords using its hashtags. Hashtags are simply keywords with a hash (#) in front of them. A few examples would be #interviewquestions, #resumetips, #careerchange and #jobsearch. When you enter one of these terms, you get the latest posts that include them.

Twitter Lists are similar to Google Reader. They filter tweets and help you organize them. Anyone can make a list and you can follow them. What you then see is all of the sources where they're pulling their content from. So, if you find a Twitter user such as a famous marketer or a careers industry expert who shares great content, you can subscribe to them and to any of their lists. This gives you their top picks, which you can then share with your followers.

SmartBrief on Your Career
If you're just getting started with content curation, one good (FREE) email newsletter to sign up for is SmartBrief on Your Career. It's a content curation site itself, but it can lead you to resources that you can then curate for use with your own clients. The editors of SmartBrief on Your Career choose articles from "thousands of news sites, blogs, and other sources." You can start your content curation with SmartBrief, but be sure to provide your own insight and analysis to the articles you share.

Remember: Curation, Not Collection
These are all easy ways to get content to share with jobseekers, but remember that curation isn't the same as collection. Be selective about what you share, making sure it is relevant to your readers. Give them only what you think will be helpful or interesting to them, and then add your own comments or insights. With content curation, less is more. Don't share 25 links — instead, share 2, or 5.

Other ideas:

Social Mention - http://www.socialmention.com/
Search social networks for content based on keywords and receive results via email. Also has a widget for tracking realtime news.

Monitter - http://monitter.com/
For Twitter search – Get real time and trending search results based on keywords

Social bookmarking sites
Most social bookmarking sites make it easy to keep track of content you find interesting so that you can go back to it later – Delicious, Diigo, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc.

Instapaper – http://www.instapaper.com/
Tool for saving content to read later. Great for when you come across something interesting but just don’t have even a few minutes to look at it.

Alltop - http://my.alltop.com/
Organize your favorite content sources so you can access them easily. You can also share your collections.

Flipboard - http://flipboard.com/
App for iPhone, iPad and Android that organizes your content sources into a magazine format in which you can “flip” the pages with your finger. You can also share from within the app.

Next Up (Last Post in the Series): Do's and Don'ts of Content Curation