The document provides an overview of using LinkedIn and Twitter with students to help with career development. It discusses mapping different social media tools to career learning tasks, provides examples of how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to research organizations and contacts, and identifies opportunities and threats of social media use. The presenter aims to help careers professionals learn ways to incorporate social media into their work with students.

1. LinkedIn and Twitter Lab
at #asml11
Helen Buzdugan
University of Manchester
26 January 2011

2. Objectives
• Ways of using LinkedIn and Twitter with
students – helping you to help them!
• Some ideas from me and hands-on practice
• Sharing our ideas, experiences and tips as we
go along
• Time for questions!
But won’t be covering…
Careers Service’s ‘corporate’ social media
accounts
Facebook

3. Where are you on the social media
novice to guru scale?
A) I wouldn’t know a tweet from a twit!
B) I know a bit about Twitter and LinkedIn but
haven’t really used them much
C) I’ve joined fairly recently and created my
profiles and started to try a few things
D) I’ve been using these for a while now and am
pretty competent, but feel I could always learn
more
E) My colleagues call me the Careers Service’s
“social media guru”!

4. How can social media help us
in our work?
Can we map different web tools and social
media against career development
learning tasks?

5. Career Development
Learning Tasks
SELF OPPORTUNITIES
DOTS Model 5 CDL Tasks
1. Improving self-awareness
Tony Watts
& Bill Law
DECISIONS (skills, interests, values,
motivations etc)
2. Researching opportunities
(types of work)
3. Making career decisions
4. Finding opportunities (e.g. job
TRANSITIONS search)
5. Application process (CVs,
(APPLICATIONS) interviews etc)

6. Self Researching Career Finding Application
awareness opportunities decisions opportunities process
Guidance
interview ● ● ● ● ●
Careers
Website ○ ● ○ ● ●
RSS feeds
○ ● ○
LinkedIn
● ○ ○ ○
Forum ○ ● ○ ○ ●
Facebook
○ ○ ○
Twitter
○ ● ○
Blog ○ ● ○ ○ ●
YouTube
video or ○ ● ○ ○ ●
podcast
Social
bookmarking
○ ● ○ ● ○

7. How I use social media
LABOUR MARKET POLL SHARE GOOD
INTELLIGENCE PEOPLE’S PRACTICE
VIEWS
GET
FIND OUT WHAT
ENGAGE LATEST NEWS,
OTHER CAREERS
EVENTS &
WITH SERVICES ARE DOING!
OPPORTUNITIES
ISSUES
MAKE GET ANSWERS FORM AND JOIN
USEFUL TO BURNING COMMUNITIES
CONTACTS QUESTIONS

8. Latest news, events and
opportunities - Twitter
• Competition to win a paid fashion
internship at Elle
• Opportunity to win 4 shows as presenter
on the Hits radio station
• Live Q&A on Twitter on ‘The Future of
Charities’ with the CEO of the RNID
• Article about the future of careers services
in the Times Higher Ed

9. Sharing good practice
• Discussion threads in the LinkedIn ‘UK HE
Careers Professionals’ group about instant
messaging guidance, social media, dealing with
students’ expectations
Polling people’s views
• Asked my local media contacts on Twitter ‘What
do you think of unpaid internships?’
• Set up Twitpoll to see what smartphones
students use

10. Labour market intelligence -
LinkedIn
• Find out what types of organisations
employ people from a computational
linguistics background
• Research career trajectories – how do
people get into a CSR role
• Coming soon… viewing your graduates’
1st & 2nd destinations – ‘Career Explorer’
tool

11. Get answers to burning
questions
• “Do you use case studies as part of your
graduate selection process?” Question to
AGR LinkedIn group
Make useful contacts
• Within one hour, managed to find two local
professionals for an employer panel for
Politics students via Twitter

12. Engaging with issues

13. LinkedIn – ‘Facebook for
Professionals’
• 90+ million members in 200 countries
• 5+ million in UK
• A new member joins every second
• BUT only 9% of University of Manchester
students/grads use LinkedIn frequently or
sometimes, compared with 94% for Facebook
(Survey of 747 students/grads, 2010)

14. Twitter
• 106 million users worldwide
(but not all are regular, active users)
• 50% of users are 18-34
(so students and graduates are a key
group)
• BUT Only 18% of University of
Manchester students and grads used
Twitter ‘frequently’ or ‘sometimes’
(March 2010)

15. Two ways of looking at these stats
1. “Hardly any students use Twitter or
LinkedIn so there isn’t much point us
engaging with this yet.”
2. “Twitter and LinkedIn are really valuable
tools for students’ job hunting and
networking, plus having a strong,
professional online presence is
increasingly important, so let’s see how
we can encourage more to engage.”

16. Some ways I use LinkedIn
with students
• Exploring job roles – what job titles are there in x and
what organisations do people in x work for
• Researching career trajectories to see how people get
into a desired role
• Identifying organisations to target (by sector or
location)
• Researching organisations – e.g. what sort of people
do they employ, where do they have offices
• Identifying contacts to target for ‘informational
meetings’ or work experience
• Developing contacts for working overseas
• Unlimited potential…

17. 6 of my favourite things
about LinkedIn
1. You can see who your 2nd and 3rd degree contacts are
2. You don’t have to already know people to start building
your network on LinkedIn
3. You can keep in touch with people even when they
change jobs (or we can keep in touch with students
after guidance appointments and see what they do
when they graduate…)
4. There’s no blurring of personal and professional – it’s
ALL professional
5. You can dip in and out of it as you need to
(but the more you put in, the more you get out)
6. Is it 6 degrees of separation, or just 3…?

18. Scenario 1 – Identifying
organisations
Scenario
A student wants to get some publishing work
experience back home in Brighton over the
summer and wants help with identifying
publishers to target. They’ve tried the usual
Google search but not got too far.
LinkedIn task
Do an advanced company search, using the
Brighton postcode BN1 2RE and sector
‘Publishing’. What would you then suggest
students do with this list?

19. Scenario 2 – Researching
organisations
Scenario
A student has an interview with an organisation called
Armstrong Learning, and wants to find out more about
them.
LinkedIn task
Do a basic company search for ‘Armstrong Learning’.
Look especially at ‘insightful statistics’ and profiles of
employees. How could you/students use this data?
Experiment with searching for other companies. Can you
find any big graduate recruiters?

20. Scenario 3 – Identify contacts
Scenario
A student is considering a career in football coaching. You
suggest identifying some contacts in your area for
‘informational interviews’ initially.
LinkedIn task
Do an advanced people search using the keyword ‘football
coach’ and select the sector ‘Sports’. Look at the available
profiles and see if you can identify any suitable contacts.
NB: If you can only see job titles in your search results, look
for relevant sector groups to join first, to give you access to
people’s full profiles.
TIP: Try joining ‘UK Sports’ and/or ‘UK Sports Network’, as
you don’t have to wait for approval to join these groups

21. Scenario 4 – Researching an area of
work and career paths
Scenario
A student is interesting in doing something to do with
equality and diversity but doesn’t know what roles exist and
what organisations might employ such people.
LinkedIn task
Do a people search using just the keywords ‘equality and
diversity’ and perhaps location ‘UK’ to find UK specific jobs.
Look at people’s profiles. What different jobs have they
done? Who did they work for? What did they study etc?
NB: Again, you might need to join a relevant group to view
full job profiles here, but otherwise just look at their basic
profile to get an idea.

22. Joining LinkedIn groups
• Joining groups is essential for students to
expand their network of contacts
• Can automatically view most profiles of (and
send message to) people in same group
Tips:
• Useful to join groups to show students on your
profile
• See if groups are UK specific
• Look for high membership groups
• Change your settings for the group to ‘weekly
digest’ or de-select the Digest email box

23. Most common questions from
students
• What can I put in my LinkedIn profile as
I’m ‘only a student’?
• How can I make contacts on LinkedIn?

24. Get started with LinkedIn
• Complete your own profile as fully as possible
• Join some relevant groups (can join up to 50)
• Join in some group discussions
• Find some of your own students or recent
graduates on LinkedIn as examples
• In my experience, students need to be shown
how to search LinkedIn for contacts,
organisations etc (so it helps to be familiar with it
first)

25. How students can contact
people via LinkedIn
• Check if the person has a Twitter profile
(if so, consider making contact via Twitter first)
• Check their contact settings for ‘expertise requests’
• Usual networking rules apply!
• Approach more junior people first, not CEOs
• Ask for advice initially; perhaps an ‘informational
interview’ – can lead to work experience and perhaps
even a job
• There is a word limit for messages to anyone who is not
a direct contact (e.g. group contact) – a short paragraph
• Also consider starting discussion in a relevant group

26. LinkedIn – useful groups to join
Types of groups include:
• Careers professionals groups
• Graduate recruiter/business groups
• Local/regional networking groups
• University alumni groups
• Sector specific groups
• Company alumni groups

27. LinkedIn – useful links
• Refer students and graduates to:
http://grads.linkedin.com (5 useful short
‘getting started’ videos)
• Example student profile to show:
www.linkedin.com/in/samuelroutledge

28. Twitter – the basics and a bit more…
• Tweeting (use a link shortener like http://tinyurl.com to
shorten long web links)
• Searching
• Following people
• Lists – try following
www.twitter.com/helenbuz/lists/careers-people or
www.twitter.com/helenbuz/lists/careers-services
• Retweets (RT)
• Using hashtags (#) e.g. #asml11
• Replies (@) and direct messages (DM)
• Directories
• Polls – see http://twtpoll.com/udj5hz
• Hootsuite

29. Twitter scenario
A student is interested in getting into
magazine publishing and she is keen to
get some work experience and find out
more about opportunities. In what ways
could she use Twitter to help her?

30. Suggestions – part 1
• Follow people and organisations that tweet
publishing jobs using the Twitter search
function for keywords or by a #, Twitter
directories (e.g. www.twellow.com and
following other people’s lists.
• You can help your students by setting up lists
for different sectors and encouraging students
to follow them.
E.g. www.twitter.com/helenbuz/publishing-
careers

31. Suggestions – part 2
• Follow people working in publishing. Observe
them for a while and see what sorts of things
they tweet about.
• Retweet interesting things and comment on the
industry news – try to sound like a
“professional in development”.
• As you start to build up a following join in
conversations.
• If you have a blog, link to that and your
LinkedIn profile, and feed your blog posts onto
Twitter so that people following you on Twitter
can see examples of your ideas and your
writing.

32. *NEW* Fusing social networking
and job search
• The job search engine Simply Hired
(www.simplyhired.co.uk) connects with
your Facebook or LinkedIn contacts to
show you if you have any contacts (even
2nd or 3rd degree) in organisations
advertising vacancies

33. Opportunities and Threats
Opportunities Threats
• Instant information on • Information overload
anything
• Communication with • 24/7 ‘always on’ culture
anyone anywhere and erosion of privacy
• Everyone can be a • No quality control
publisher – hard to assess validity
• More things possible • Pace of technological
every day advance can overwhelm

34. Contact
Helen Buzdugan
Careers Consultant, with special responsibility for web and
interactive technologies)
MLP, Careers & Employability Division
University of Manchester, UK
• Email: helen.buzdugan@manchester.ac.uk
• Phone: +44 161 275 2828 (careers switchboard)
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/helenbuzdugan
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/helenbuz
• Slides available at: www.slideshare.com/helenpownall