Social Media Explosion: Why Your Personal Brand Matters Even More

Social Media Stats

A recent article on Talent HQ indicates the following social media statistics from Spring 2012:

Users

• Facebook – 850 million
• Twitter – 500 million
• LinkedIn – 161 million
• Google+ – 90 million
• Foursquare – 23 million
• Pinterest – 10.4 million

Daily Activity

• Facebook – 31% of users check-in daily for an average of 20 minutes
• Twitter – 175 million tweets per day
• LinkedIn – 11.5 million searches per day
• Google+ – 5 billion g+ buttons served each day (served, not clicked)
• YouTube – 4 billion video views per day

Personal Branding: Why These Stats Make It Relevant

“So what,” you say? “What do these social media statistics have to do with my personal brand, my IT resume or technical resume, and my job search?” It’s simple. Companies are going to expect to find you on one or more of these sites when considering you as a candidate for a job opening. As such, it opens the door for opportunity.

I suppose you could try to be like everybody else out there is SoMe (social media) land. That’s easy enough. Just sign up for a few of these services and write the standard description of yourself that makes people reading it fall asleep within 3 seconds.

The alternative is to craft a strong, compelling personal brand statement that is real to who you are, what you do, and what you want to do. Then put some creative messaging in place to effectively communicate this brand across all of the social media forums you’re a part of. Just keep in mind that these forums are all different, and the demographics are distinct for each…so the style you use to communicate your brand message should correlate with the site you’re on.