LinkedIn occupies 170 pages, while the other three social media sites he book covers only take up 69 pages combined. But this is as it should be. LinkedIn is “the” business networking site, which means it’s a great place to find a job, while Facebook might help you find a job, but is way better than LinkedIn if you’re trying to find a boyfriend or girlfriend.

When I was laid off from my last full-time job, in 2008, I immediately posted my availability for freelance work on LinkedIn. And two days later I had a substantial freelance assignment due to a colleague in Texas introducing me to a startup CEO in N. Carolina. I live in Florida. This is a perfect example of both the way the WWW can make the earth seem like a neighborhood, not a planet, and of social networking: one friend connected me to another one of his friends, and we all benefited from the introduction either directly or indirectly.

My LinkedIn profile is “complete” in LinkedIn terms, which means it’s a combination resume and statement of my purpose in life, such as it is. I have over 500 LinkedIn contacts, most of whom sought me out, not the other way around, and I have a bunch of unsolicited recommendations. “How to Find a Job on…” says you need all of these things, which I figured out on my own. But the book contains lots of advice beyond the rudimentary steps I took, including tips on how to use LinkedIn’s various professional groups as ways to raise your profile and generally meet people without openly begging for a job.

The real scoop: Most of what you put on LinkedIn that will help you find a job should already be there when you start looking. You are not going to be able to round up 500 real contacts in a day or two. You can probably get two or five or 10 people to recommend you; I’ve never asked for recommendations, but I’ve had friends ask for them and I’ve happily told the world that they’re cool, intelligent hard workers — which they all were.

More real scoop: This is something that needs to be said over and over, and it applies to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Jim’s Social Buddies Network, your own website or blog, and really the entire Internet: Assume everything you post or write in a LinkedIn or Facebook message or even in an email (especially if it’s to an email group) is public information, not private, even if you think it’s private or you post it someplace that’s supposed to be private.

We’ve all seen the stories about teachers who got fired because a school district administrator saw online pics of them working as topless fishing boat deckhands or pouring beer on their heads while obviously drunk at a party. What if your blog is full of sympathy for the Occupy movement and the person who needs to hire someone with exactly your skills is a staunch Tea Party believer? Good-bye, job offer!

But you don’t necessarily need to hide your true identity behind an online mask of blandness. On the political and religious front, strong beliefs will repel some people. It’s also possible that they will attract more potential employers and freelance clients than they repel.

An example would be my own roblimo.com personal blog. It is highly political, and by the standards of Fox News and the Tea Party, almost entirely socialist. Since I’m retired and take on only a few small writing and video jobs, I don’t worry about losing ultra-conservative clients. There are plenty of liberals who hire me in part because of my political views, and plenty of libertarians who disagree with me politically but are old friends.

And now, back to the book. The authors talk about LinkedIn jobseeker premium accounts. I’ve never tried a LinkedIn premium account and probably never will. But the little extra “juice” they give you might be worthwhile, especially if you’re young and have your feet on a bottom rung of the IT career ladder and want a little boost to speed your climb.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google+

Just because authors Brad and Debra Schepp spend a majority of their book’s pages talking about LinkedIn, and I personally boost LinkedIn, doesn’t mean you should ignore Facebook. I stay away from business-type stuff on Facebook, much the same way I work in my home office but not in my living room. You are not me, so there is no reason for you to do as I do. Read up on how to use Facebook as a job-search aid and do it. Twitter, too. I am not personally a Twitter fan, but I am not an NBA fan, either, and plenty of others are. Google+? It’s still building, but enough of the tech journalists and IT bloggers I know are on it that it’s worth a daily read and a weekly post (or two) for me, although it may not be worth your time at its current stage of development.

One thing I believe about Google+ is that it competes more with LinkedIn than with Facebook. To me, it has a professional feel, and I use it primarily for professional activity. A job-seeker (you?) might want to post not only information out of your own head about your field of expertise (rather than a direct “please hire me” pitch), along with links to relevant articles, perhaps with your own commentary added. The “Circles” that make Google+ run make it more of an overarching tool than Facebook, which is fighting back with different groupings and such for your different friends; an effort I find complicated to the point of uselessness.

Now Read the Book

Remember the title: How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It costs $13.36 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million, and Books-A-Million has an eBook version available for $8.85, which is a lot better than the B&N $11.60 eBook price.

As I said, this book is worth buying. It’s a great job-finding guide, but most of the advice it contains also applies to freelancing and small-business marketing.

One Amazon reviewer wrote, “It wasn’t helpful for me. It didn’t contain any new information that I hadn’t already read in articles and blogs about the same topic.”

Whatever.

I’ve been working online since the mid-1980s, and *I* learned from this book, so you probably will, too.

At job-hunt.org there’s an article from 2010 headlined, The “Slack” Times That Are GREAT Times to Job Search. The article says:

“Most job seekers slack off during two times of the year. I’m not saying they’re slackers (although they might be), but I am saying that they are making wrong assumptions about what employers are doing during those 2 times.

“As a consequence, they are costing themselves FABULOUS opportunities to connect with employers and probably extending their job search for longer, possibly MUCH longer, than it needs to be!”

This makes sense: if “everybody knows” nobody hires during the holiday season or the other great slack time, summer, and because of this fewer people look for jobs during these periods, those who keep up their job searches instead of taking a breather have an extra-good chance of finding a job.

The article also points out that January is typically the highest-traffic month on job-search sites, which means it’s the month when you have the most competition. November and December, which have the lowest traffic counts, are obviously far better for you.

On LinkedIn, this question — Christmas Time Job Hunting & Hiring, do you slow down? — had drawn 17 answers by the time I typed this blog post.

Almost all of the answers are from headhunters, resume writers, and others who track employment markets professionally. Most of them say the holidays are at least as good a time as any to look for a job. But it’s best if you read what they have to say for yourself, so I’ll get out of your way now.

The Biznik motto is “Going it alone. Together.” The whole point of the site is to hook you up with fellow entrepreneurs and other people who may have similar goals to yours so you can help each other succeed.

I don’t have a site review/rating scheme, but if I did, and it used a 1 – 5 scale, Biznik would score between 4.5 and 5.

Old-line resume advisors talk about whether your resume should be one page or two, and how far back you should go in it if you’re over 30 or 40 or whatever arbitrary cutoff age they believe will cause employers in your field to balk.

Now, suddenly, we’re talking, on Twitter, of compressing your resume to 140 characters or less. Not words. Characters.

If you were Terri the Terrorist Terrier, you might use something like this as your Twitter “I need a job” announcement:

• Hey, dog! I’m looking for a guard dog job. I’m literate, friendly, hard-working, and just graduated from The Woofie School. Please help.

This is exactly 140 characters. It’s not really a resume, but an ad for your skills. In Terri’s case, it starts with a bark-out to fellow dogs. Your equivalent would be a shout-out to people in your career field, followed by an “I’m looking for ____” sentence, after which you note ONE recent accomplishment that might attract someone’s attention. If you can tighten your blurb so that it’s 10 characters or so shorter than Terri’s, you can include a shortened link to your full resume, which is surely online somewhere.

Your resume is an ad for your services

This is the only sensible way to think of a resume. It’s not a bit of history and it’s probably not news. It’s a sales brochure with you as the product. And you tailor your sales material in different ways for different media.

LinkedIn is probably the most viable way to reach out and look for a job without getting caught up in the mass bins of the job sites. On LinkedIn, you can and should come up with little intro letters targeted not only at specific types of jobs, but at friends and friends of friends who might be in a position to hire you or recommend you for a job where they work.

In your LinkedIn messages, you want to stress recent, provable accomplishments you believe will be important to that particular employer. You can (and should) save that message — no more than 200 words — and crib from it when you write the next one, and crib from both of your first efforts when you write the third, and so on.

You can also broadcast your availability to the world in general through LinkedIn — and Facebook, too. This works best if you have a large number of contacts or friends on these sites, but all it takes is one or two people willing to help you, and one to hire you.

In fact, after I got laid off by SourceForge, now Geek.net, in 2008, the first sizable freelance consulting job I got was with a company in Raleigh, N. Carolina, through a friend in Austin, Texas. And I live in Bradenton, Florida. Without the Internet, and LinkedIn, I never would have made that connection.

The big job hustle mills

When you post a resume on Monster and other big-time job boards, keywords are everything. They’re how today’s swamped-with-resumes HR people decide who’s worth talking to and who isn’t.

And don’t think their resume-sort programs are smart, because they usually aren’t. The fact that you’re proficient in six programming languages and can probably pick up someone’s in-house variant of Lisp in a couple of days means nothing to the program that is supposed to screen out unqualified applicants. So on the resume you post to Monster or its more IT-centered cousin, Dice, you need to mention everything you have ever done that might cause someone to want you on their staff.

For many of us, personal contacts are best

Blast your keyword-laden resume all over the place. Put out the word to everyone on (at least) LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that you’re looking. But then, start a campaign of personal messages, emails, and even old-fashioned (voice) telephone calls to people you know. You’ve heard the expression, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” This is often true. The most proven way to find a job you might actually like is through personal contacts, and it’s such a venerable method that Ur the Chaldean stonecutter used it to get his job making statuary for the king’s tomb — which only proves that in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Be prepared to send a resume or a link to wherever you have your resume online to even your closest friends. They may know what you can do, but they may not remember all of it. And sooner or later they will almost certainly need to discuss you with coworkers who don’t know you.

Writing a resume

And this leads us back to the topic of resumes. Since everybody else in the world (I think) has written a book or at least an article on the best format for a standard resume, I’m not going to add to the noise. Instead, in a separate post I’ve listed Six Web Pages That Will Help You Write an Effective Resume, all written by people far smarter than I’ll ever be.