Enter socioclean.com! A creative programmer named Priyanshu Harshavat started this site to help job seekers get their social profiles cleaned up before it got them a rejection letter. Socioclean is a program that spiders your profiles searching for over 5,000 words an phrases that are potential job killers.

Once you have given the program permission to access your account, the program issues a letter grade and a list of inappropriate content found with links to each item. You can easily run through the list quickly and eliminate those potentially offensive items that can turn off potential employers.

You may be surprised to find how much potentially negative items you have. Don’t forget that it’s not just what you have posted, but what everybody else that posts to your profile as well. Have you joined any groups that could be considered “extremist”? These small things that you have overlooked are the same things that can “jump” of the page to a prospective employer.

So if your in the job market today, don’t just get your resume in order. Take a second look at that public profile to make sure it doesn’t cost you that dream job!

1. You’re an authority on a topic their interested in.
2. You’re an interesting conversationalist.
3. You’re funny.

While it would be nice to be all three, it just isn’t likely.  When it comes to Effective Social Media Marketing the only one on the list above that matters is number 1! You must be an authority on the topic or topics you make your living at. Even then getting people to follow you on a consistent basis can be a difficult task. Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll have more followers (and more customer) than you’ll know what to do with.

Be Clear and Concise

You may be an authority on your topic but if you’re not clear and tend to ramble, you’ll lose your audience fast. Before publishing, ask a friend or relative to read your content and then have them relay your main ideas back to you as they understand it. You may be surprised at what you here.

Know Your Facts

You may be an authority but even the pro can get it wrong. So be sure to check your facts.  Nothing will lose your followers faster than when they find out your wrong! They will then post that fact in as many places as possible to make them look smarter to those around them.

Be Objective

Keep emotion out of it. Emotion can tend to cloud your judgment and in will come through in your writing. If your followers feel you can’t be objective they’ll stop listening.

Above all, Provide VALUE!

You can be all of the things above, but without adding value in some form, it’s all for nothing. Weather it be information value, discount value or entertainment value doesn’t matter. Without VALUE nobody will stick around

Remember these few simple to follow tips on posting to your social media accounts and your followers will be around for a long time.

To your social media success!

When it comes to schools using social media, there are two main areas of discussion, communication and education:

1. The first is that of communication; where social media is used as a tool for school administrators to communicate with parents, teachers, students and community members. In turn, these new online tools are also used as a way for parents, teachers, students and community members to voice their views and opinions back to school administrators and education officials.
2. The second area of discussion is that of education, where social media is taught and used in the classroom as a platform for sharing, learning, and growing.

The first area of concern (communication) is a no-brainer. Of course your school should be using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to keep in touch and communicate with the people in your “tribe”. Social media sites such as these are a great tool for school officials to have. The tools are free, easy to use, can be run by a single person within your organization, and best of all – your parents, teachers and students are already using these services.

The second issue (that of education), however, is a little trickier. It’s trickier because while social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are fairly straightforward when it comes to giving and receiving information, things get a whole lot messier once you start giving students these exact same tools and expecting them to handle them the way adults do.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Discussing the use of social media tools as an education platform, or even as an entirely new subject matter, is an exciting concept. But the first step is to get our schools past the communication phase.

Let me repeat that: The first step is to communicate via social media… and then we can start talking about using these new tools as a platform for education.

My prediction is that over the next year or two, you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of schools take to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter as a means of communication between school administrators and the people in their immediate locale (i.e. parents, teachers, etc.).

The private schools will probably take to social media first, as they are smaller, filled with less bureaucracy, and can move a whole lot faster than the larger public institutions.

After the public schools have been thoroughly convinced that this social media stuff actually works, they’ll start to use to the tools as well, but they’ll be coming in late and playing a nasty game of catchup.

It’s only then, after both public and private schools have adopted these new tools, that we will begin to start seeing a large percentage of schools take to social media in the classroom.

But before any of that can happen, at least on a larger scale, the first step is going to be getting school administrators well versed when it comes to using these new online tools as a means for feedback, support and communication.

Photo by dalbera