Career Reinvention &
Personal Brand Strategist

Facebook Interview With Barb Safani

December 08, 2011
By: Randi Bussin-Career Coach, Personal Branding Specialist

 

 

With social networking on the rise, I have been receiving many questions from clients about the importance of Facebook for job search and other career related activities.  For this post, I decided to interview my colleague, Barb Safani in New York, who is admittedly one of the most active career coaches on Facebook and who also teaches many classes on social networking.

 

Randi: What is the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn?

 

Barb:  Facebook started out as a social networking site restricted to college students. LinkedIn began as a business networking site for professionals. Several years ago, Facebook became available to everyone and its popularity soared. In recent years, it has shifted from being "just for kids" to a rich resource for networking for business and personal reasons. In the past year alone, several third party applications have been added to the Facebook platform that are conducive to business networking and Facebook currently boasts more than 7 times the number of users as LinkedIn.

 

Randi: Do I need to be on Facebook when looking for a job?

 

Barb: I highly recommend incorporating Facebook into your job search strategy. It has robust search features for sourcing people from various companies and it has become quite commonplace for employers to have a Facebook page for building engagement with current and potential customers as well as employees.

 

Randi: If so, how do I do this?

 

Barb: Here are three easy tips:

 

• Use the search box to find people who are employed by companies that you are targeting and see if people in your network are connected to these people.
• Regularly engage in the conversations on company pages.
• Become a fan, ask questions, comment on new products, etc.

 

Randi: What kind of photos are appropriate for Facebook?

 

Barb: Show photos that you would not be concerned with an employer seeing. These do not all have to be business photos but should be ones that represent you in the way you would like to be perceived by employers.

 

Randi: Can prospective employers see everything I post on Facebook?

 

Barb: Not necessarily. You can manipulate your privacy settings to control who sees what.

 

Randi: Is there a way to control what prospective employers will see?

 

Barb: Yes. You can change your privacy features so only friends see your posts, create friend lists and manage which friends see which posts, or you can make decisions on who sees what for each item you post.

 

Barb Safani of Career Solvers

http://www.careersolvers.com/

©2012, Randi Bussin, Aspire!

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