No one is going to promote you… so promote yourself to advance your GIS or Geoscience career. PS: Your first attempts will suck… get over it.

I was recently on twitter and I saw a quote that I am twisting to fit this blog post.

Self-promotion is hard. Being unknown is hard. Choose your hard.

No, this is not a black and white issue. You can be known without ever using social media. You could probably even go your entire GIS and geoscience career without ever using social media.

But social media is free, powerful, little bit of a mine field and people use it everywhere, all the time..

In this post I am going to talk about how you can automatically start harnessing social media to make yourself 10 times more hirable in the job market.

You will not only make yourself more hirable, but you will also learn to communicate better, learn to market yourself and learn to public speak (if you go the video route).

Chances are you already spend (far too much) time on social media already.

According to studies, people spend 2 hours 23 mintes a day on social media sites.

This means people (YOU) are online a lot… and will be online A LOT MORE into the future.

Social media use varies between apps and platforms, but the numbers are telling.

Turns out by statistics, you are already poised to harness social media.

Social media has been good for me (so far).

I started my YouTube channel, Twitter account, and Instagram in 2015. Signing up was all a strategy to prove that YouTube could be used for Geoscience education.

Five years, 6200 subscribers, 100+ videos, 250,000+ views, and hundreds of posts later, social media has worked out for me.

While I am no PewdiePie or whoever else is on top of YouTube, my social media story is a success story (to reasonable degree) and you can have success too.

You don’t have to jump in like I did and start creating videos. Videos are great, but they are also hard.

There are a few steps you can off with to get your online self-promotion started.

Sort out your crappy LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a great tool to connect with professional people and allow companies to see who you are.

You are probably making serious mistakes on your LinkedIn that you need to fix TODAY.

First and foremost, you need a good profile picture. I ignore connection request if people do not have a picture.

Make sure your head line is interesting and relevant.

Here is secret… you can use the picture for your Twitter / Facebook / Instagram… and you will have “brand recognition” doing this. Your face and headline consistent across apps.

Check our more way to make a better LinkedIn account here.

Start a YouTube channel.

If you have research or work results you can share, create a video to show it off. Perhaps you have a topic you love to teach… make a video.

Perhaps you have a capstone project for school, or thesis, or a term projects… create a video of the results. Almost anything you have to give a presentation on… create a video for it.

Comment / Share / Like… just engage.

Engaging with people on your social media apps is the easiest way to start self-promoting.

The more you engage, the more you get a feel for you will need to do for better self-promotion.

Become social media savy.

Check out my YouTube channel here.

I have shirts available on my Teespring store if you would like to support me.