Catching the most snaps during college heydays may be a top priority for current undergraduate students. While these moments have their place in an online profile, students can take steps now to ensure their online reputation also paints a picture of professionalism:
- Blog about the topics you’re most interested in. Although most students won’t have the desired amount of experience upon graduation, maintaining a blog can help build a profile of subject-matter expertise in a topic you’re most interested in. You don’t always have to start from scratch. Upload abbreviated versions of assignments or recall questions from peers during lecture and answer them through your blog.
- Start a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a powerful tool that allows people to connect with companies, thought leaders, and decision makers. Don’t wait until crossing the stage to get started. Log any internship experience, upload notable projects and awards, and connect with classmates to follow each other’s career journey–you never know when those connections could pay off.
- Join or start tweet chats. When a hashtag is used on Twitter it aggregates conversations to make topics easy to follow. Seek out hashtags related to your career interest (e.g., #socialmedia, #hr) to see who is talking about those topics and proactively start conversations or respond to those people. Some thought leaders organize and host tweet chats that allow you to cut away an hour or so to engage in real-time conversations about specific topics with large groups of people.
These are all pretty easy to do and don’t take too much time to get started.
Have any of these tactics worked for you? Feel free to let me know others you recommend!
@nLight11 