These days, we always hear and read about how social media is such a great tool to help further your career. Using your online profiles can help you find the job of your dreams when you're looking for one. The truth may be so in a few cases, but the other side of the coin is that social media can be dangerous to your professional image when used incorrectly. This is yet another reason why you shouldn't follow the online career advice you find floating around the web indiscriminately (even though this post falls into this category as well). Of course, there are still good pieces of online career advice, but you should take everything with a grain of salt and consider if the advice really fits your personal situation or not.
Let's take social media, while we're on this topic. If you don't benefit from sound advice regarding how to behave online, even the smallest detail present on one of your online profiles could come under scrutiny by your potential employers and thus make it more difficult for you to get the job. This isn't limited only to compromising party photos you may be tagged in on Facebook, but it may include more subtle mistakes as well. The first thing you need to do before attuning your social media profiles to your job target is to ask yourself 'What job is right for me?' Then, continue by striving to make everything which can be found about you online reflect the qualities needed for the desired job. The PR niche may require you to be more quirky and sociable, while a job in financial statistics will require more sober qualities, for example.
Should you rely entirely on Online Career Advice?
Social media is usually recommended, first and foremost, for the so-called and ever praised 'networking'. But the concept may be outdated on today's job market, actually. If networking used to mean establishing many professional connections and profiting from them 10 years ago (through better access to job offers), today its meaning is closer to stumbling around and wasting time trying to awkwardly socialize with people in your professional niche. The real game-changer is nowadays crowdsourcing, as the one activity doing the job which networking initially set out to do.
Through crowdsourcing, companies obtain the resources, services or information they may need through appealing to an online community (and hiring freelancers from it) rather than getting all those things from their employees. This makes sense because the company may need certain skills only for a certain project and it wouldn't really make much sense to hire someone fulltime since the project will have a limited duration.
The best places you can actively engage in crowdsourcing for yourself are the Uber and Zenefits hubs, both bearing their own advantages and disadvantages. The perks and downsides of each are described at large in this recent Quora article, but the bottom line is that both of them are almost an employment place once you managed to get accepted as a member, and they can both be a pretty elitist place to be in. To give your resume a much more polished feel, joining a community such as these two and/or pursuing crowdsourcing through alternate means is definitely a good way to go. Job seeking will be much more easier once you start!