What you do online should also be consistent with what you say or write offline. Here are four pointers for maintaining a consistent image.

- Be scrupulously careful with dates and titles.
Make sure that your employment or education facts are consistent on both your CV and in online profiles, such as LinkedIn or Visual CV. If you’ve embellished the truth on your CV, it may well be discovered by a social media-savvy recruiter or hiring manager doing some candidate research.

- Use excerpts from LinkedIn recommendations on your CV as testimonials.
Adding endorsements to your CV (particularly to your Professional profile or Key Achievements sections) adds a touch of third-party objectivity to your CV.

- Consider merging your Twitter and LinkedIn updates.
Update your LinkedIn profile with all or some of your Twitter updates. (The edit profile settings on LinkedIn allow you to add your Twitter username, then choose whether to automatically update your LI profile with all your Twitter updates, or only those where you add the hashtag #in to the end of your tweet.)

This has the advantage not only of keeping your LI profile fresh with regular updates, but also of helping you send out the same information (links to your blog posts, comments on forums etc) on two different networks.

- Be careful about what you post.
An obvious point, but there’s not much – if any – real privacy online. What you post today is likely to be publicly available years into the future, so make sure your posts, comments and tweets reflect the type of professional image you want to portray.

How to manage your online reputation (my recent Guardian careers blog post) has more tips for creating a professional online image.

Photo credit: Duncanh1

- Organisation
By creating and labelling your own lists, you can keep themed areas of interest together. You might have job boards in one list and careers coaches in another; or arrange lists by industry, such as IT consultants on one list, web developers on another, for example.

There’s a limit to how many lists you can create, and how many people you can put into each list, but the list names can be edited, and you can take people out of one list and put them in another through the “Manage lists” button.

- Time-saving
The more you follow, the more tweets you’ll be wading through, and the greater the chance that you’ll miss something useful. Keeping up-to-date with what people are saying becomes increasingly more time-consuming as you follow more people, but lists mean you can dip in and out to get nuggets of useful information without trawling back through pages and pages of tweets.

- Focussed networking
As I went through the names of people I follow, it made me rethink the reasons I followed thrm in the first place. Very often we follow those that follow us, in the spirit of reciprocity and etiquette, but we may never actually engage with that person – or even find their tweets entertaining or useful.

Lists are a good way to assign people into groups which you might only glance at occasionally, freeing you up to interact with people you have more in common with. It helps you achieve quality over quantity in your conversations.

- Professional reputation
Unless you have multiple Twitter accounts, the people you follow probably include friends, family and professional contacts. Twitter lists can be public or private, so you can keep your personal contacts in a locked list, visible only to you.

Your lists appear on your Twitter sidebar and can be followed by others, so enhance your professional reputation by following (and being followed by) industry leaders, while protecting the privacy of your personal contacts.

How else are Twitter lists useful?

If you’ve never networked before, or think it will require you to barge into people’s conversations, wave business cards under the noses of people you’ve never met, or engage in excrutiating small talk about the weather, read the rest of the article I wrote for the Guardian: Network into your next job.

Maintaining and developing contacts is obviously useful for much more than asking for a reference, and it’s a recurrent theme in the Guardian career forums. With the explosion of social media – notably LinkedIn and Twitter – it’s also much easier to find mentors, old bosses and colleagues, and people who are in a position to help you.

Here are a couple of articles I wrote on the basics of social media for job seekers: Using social media and Getting the most from social media.

Then you’re probably having little success, according to the research findings reported in Examiner.com. The second and third methods might get 7 or 8 people in a hundred a job. The chances of landing a job from an internet job board are even lower: less than 1% are successful this way.

The absolute best way to get a job according to the article is to target the companies that require your skills, find the person who is in a position to offer you a job, then ask for an interview.

This advice is also backed up by a survey of HR executives, quoted in Hirediversity. The most effective use of your time is networking and making personal contacts. After that, social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter are the most useful.

Although this research is US-based, it applies equally well elsewhere. Many jobs are filled through recommendations and word-of-mouth, so if you’re looking for work now, or simply testing the waters for future possibilities, networking is where you should spend most time and effort.

100+ Career Blogs ALL Professionals MUST Read

These blogs are written by coaches and experts in personal branding and marketing, career and job searching, networking, social media and resume writing.

The 101 BEST JOB SEARCH/CAREER TWEEPS

Find the twitter account (plus associated url) of career coaches, recruiters, resume writers etc.

Industry-specific reading
Don’t forget to search for other blogs specific to your industry. Commenting on posts is a great way to get professional exposure. Also search for industry luminaries to follow on Twitter.

10 Ways to Find People on Twitter (Mashable)
50 Sites to help you search for tweets, trends and more

Don’t forget: following someone on Twitter isn’t a life-long commitment. You can decide to unfollow someone if their updates are no longer relevant to your interests, or start following them again if your interests coincide.

But along with the worst global recession in sixty odd years has come an explosion in the use of social media. (Social media = content created and shared by people using accessible publishing technologies, such as the internet.) No longer do you need to go out and buy the newspaper and scan the classified ads to find a job. Instead, you can log on to Twitter or a job board, for example, to find new opportunities.

But crucially, social media, such as blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook, offer everyone – really everyone, at every level of the company, regardless of rank or title – the chance to share information about what’s going on and to create and build personal relationships. Everyone gets the chance to participate in discussions, share opinions, highlight new trends, and as long as you don’t blow it, you can build up your online reputation and increase your chances of being considered for the next vacancy.

In an excellent article, David Finch mentions fifteen things that social media can do for you. Some of his points that are most relevant to job seekers are these:

Social media
- allows you to participate in networks that at one time you didn’t have access to.
- gives you access to thought leaders
- connects you to employment opportunities
- allows you the ability to build a global network easier
- provides a platform to build and promote a personal brand
- increases the opportunity to become a thought leader in your area of expertise
- connects you with business opportunities – partnerships and funding
- gives you access to information faster, easier and in real time.
- makes it easier to share information with your networks

It’s true that job seekers are facing a recruitment squeeze not seen since the early 90’s. But it’s also true that there are now more tools at our disposal than at any other time, to make contacts and uncover opportunities. Taking the time to build online relationships and increase a network of contacts is one of the quickest routes into a new job.

Click here for more articles by David Finch.

Obviously, it’s in everyone’s best professional interests to make sure that the sort of information that surfaces puts that person in the best possible light. There are plenty of stories of people losing their jobs because they boasted about pulling a sickie, or posted questionable content about themselves.

But almost as damaging as dodgy photos or bravado comments of fiddling company expenses, is not having any internet presence at all. What thoughts would run through a hiring manager’s mind if she could find no trace of you? No LinkedIn profile, no comments on industry-related blogs, no twitter account – nothing? Possibly that you’ve never used the internet before, or worse, that you have no interest at all in your particular field.

And the same is true if you’re a freelancer applying for your next project. If you haven’t helped people out on a forum, or contributed to a discussion in your area of expertise, there’s no clear or objective evidence to show a potential client that you’ve got the skills and experience to do a job.

If, on the other hand, someone researches you on Google and a whole series of links comes up showing your involvement in your sphere of professional activity, you demonstrate interest in your career, as well as personal expertise. In short, by making yourself visible, you’ll be putting yourself ahead of the pack.

Here are seven tips for increasing your professional visibility:

1. Join LinkedIn if you haven’t already.
Create a full profile, and keep it updated with your most recent work details. Then, find LinkedIn groups focussing on your specialist area, and contribute to their discussions.

2. Join Twitter and follow people who may be able to help you in your career.
Make sure you create a profile, and put in a url to your blog or site, or your LinkedIn profile, to allow people to find out more information about you.

3. Consider setting up a blog that will showcase your expertise.
Blogs are hard work, so you’ll need to commit yourself to updating it regularly. If you don’t have the time to do this, your blog may appear “abandoned”, even leading visitors to think you’re the sort of person who can’t commit to something in the long-term.

4. Contribute regularly to other forums and blogs
If you don’t have the time or interest in launching your own, make sure you’re visible on others. Participate in discussions, or answer questions others may have. Enhance your image by making sure your contributions are in standard English, with correct punctuation, spelling and grammar. Don’t write negative, angry or sarcastic comments, as they can be easily misunderstood and end up harming your image.

5. If you’re actively looking for work, get your CV in as many places as you can.
As well as uploading your CV to job boards, also consider creating a multimedia CV on Visual CV. Visual CV is free, and allows you to create your own page, where you can add documents (word, excel, powerpoint, pdf), images (charts, photos, graphics), video, audio and links. You can then email it to recruiters, save it as a PDF, or forward the URL.

6. Get a Google profile
Launched in April 2009, Google profiles are personal profiles which appear at the bottom of the page when you put in a name search. They’re useful not only if you share the same name as someone else (so helping you to avoid a case of mistaken identity) but also because you can upload your photo, bio, contact information (if you include it) and links to your blog and profiles on other sites.

See some sample profiles here.

7. Separate the professional from the personal
If you use Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family, consider changing the profile and search settings so that your page is only visible and accessible to friends. Obviously, this means that you won’t be accessible to recruiters, so you’ll need to decide whether you need this level of privacy, or whether it’s more useful for you to be visible everywhere online.

Photo credit: pdbreen

Claudia Loens suggests adding text boxes to the front page of your blog to highlight accomplishments, or posting a copy of a successful presentation you’ve given.

I’d also add that if you start a blog, consider adding more content than just your CV and cover letter. Add posts that show your particular expertise, and keep your blog current with industry analysis and news. Finally, linking your blog to others in your industry will help you get noticed.

More information on using blogging as a career promotion strategy.