Networking Has Never Been Easier

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Job fairs. Everyone has been through it one way or another, where potential employees bring copies of their resumes and try to ‘sell’ themselves to businesses. Many are successful in gaining employer’s attention, others leave an impression. Networking is a vital part of one’s career, and has typically been simple to accomplish. It has been kept the same for the past decades, until the rise of social media.

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In recent years, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook have become a household name among the younger population. So well-known that it has affected the ways businesses are able to connect with others. Joshua Bleasdale of “The Advancement of Networking” said that, “Companies see this as a new form of networking” (Bleasdale, 2019). To further explain, in the eyes of companies, social media isn’t just used to post pictures and comment about how the day is going, but is used as today’s form of networking

Influencers

One way companies are able to expand and profit from this trend are through influencers. Bleasdale described them as a “User of social media that has established credibly [sic] in a specific industry (i.e. cosmetics, fashion, and athletics)” (Bleasdale, 2019). To make it simple, ‘influencers’ are people who have established a name or reputation for themselves and are able to influence others. Companies look for these ‘influencers’ in order to help promote their brand and product.

Social media has an unlimited number of influencers. Instead of reading resumes, through social media companies look at the number of likes and number of followers an influencer has. Companies try to connect with these influencers because they know that by having these influencers promote their products that the thousands of followers will see too.

Benefits

Social media is providing companies with the ability to network with thousands of people that they may never have met through a normal job fair. This rise in social media enables companies to mass communicate to a wider audience through the use of several different platforms. The plus side; social media is completely free! Networking has never been easier.

Work Cited

Bleasdale, J. (2019, February 27). Influence of social media in business networking [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/the-advancements-of-networking/influence-of-social-media-in-business-networking-ff648c38897b.