Is your social networking contact list important enought to land you a job?  How do you respond when near the end of your interview you are asked if you have a large personal social network? This is a question I have been thinking about for several weeks. A friend of mine who is about to graduate from college asked me to help him develop a “social networking profie” as part of his overall resume development. He is a business major and while he is fairly internet savvy he says he still doesn’t understand the whole idea of social network marketing.  I asked him if they discussed it in any of their classes and he said no. He went on to say that most of his instructors were older and “not really into that whole internet thing”.  How sad to know that after all the money and time he has invested in his education that he is not up to date on what is happening in the real time world of marketing.

So we are going to start to build his “social network” as well as develop his online persona. One thing I told him staight away was that personal social networks are just what the name implies. The key word is social, not sell or solicit or do business with…  Social networks are a way of keeping in touch with friends and family as well as others in the same line of work as you are. With that in mind we set up the three basic accounts; Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I explained that these accounts needed to be built naturally and evenly.  By that I meant “no adding 100 people a day” to each account.  In fact I explained that for now he just needs to forget the reason he is starting in social networking and just have fun. I went over the advantages and differences of each of the accounts how they can all eventually be leveraged (in the correct way) as a future list of potential business contacts or a referal system. But for now just spend a little time each day “playing” on Facebook and Twitter and maybe once a week on LinkedIn.  The most important thing is to develop relationships with those contacts.

It will be interesting to see how his online social networking persona develops over the coming months. Graduation is in May 2010 so by then he should have a good sized network in place.  Will a potential employer ask him about it? Possibly. Will he be obliged to tell his potential employer about his social networking contact list? Not really.  Companies are always seeking new ways to market their products and services and personal references have always been the best way to accomplish this and in today’s digital age social networking is the way to do it.

What is your opinion on employers asking about your personal social networks?