Selling Your Social Media Chops In Your MBA App
October 04, 2018 :: Jacob Allison
Are you great at posting? Do your Instagram photos look like they were taken by a professional photographer? Do you have thousands of followers on Twitter? A new study conducted by the Financial Times suggests that you might be able to use that social media savviness to help you land that crucial post-MBA job.
The study looks at what skills employers are looking for in MBA graduates, and one of the most interesting findings is that employers who are looking for MBAs to fill high-level positions in their organizations are struggling to find graduates who have the skills to improve business through social media.
Now, before you start listing your follower count and number of retweets on your resume, and posting your selfies on your LinkedIn page, hold up. Companies aren’t simply looking for social media junkies, they’re looking for people who have creatively used social media to make money, increase a user base, or differentiate a brand. Then again, there was that guy who made a resume entirely out of gifs…
Here at Admissionado, we know that MBA programs are not only looking for applicants with great GMAT scores and work experience, but for people that have already demonstrated skills that will make them successful after graduation. So, if companies are now looking for people that can use social media to improve business, MBA programs are probably starting to look for the same skills in B-school applicants. Communicating those skills in your application will take a nuanced approach, as simply listing “Social Media Skills” in the additional information section of your resume might come across as a little vapid.
Here are some examples of how we might help an applicant communicate their social media skills to a B-school:
Say you recently led a project to revamp hiring processes at your firm, and as part of that project, you utilized Facebook and LinkedIn to increase the reach of your company’s job listings. This is a great opportunity to show how you’ve used social media to impact business at your company. Our suggestion? Focus on the impact. We say this a lot, but that’s because it’s IMPORTANT. A resume bullet highlighting this success could look something like this:
Led project to revamp analyst hiring process, introduced targeted Facebook and LinkedIn advertising of vacancies, increasing the number of applicants with advanced degrees by 75%.
The same impact-focused approach works for MBA essays, too. Many MBA applications, like Fuqua’s, ask applicants to lay out their plans for making an impact on the school’s community. This could include an applicant’s plans for participating in things like clubs, organizations, and events. These types of questions offer the perfect opportunity to highlight your social media impact experience. For example, if you’re going to write about your plans for becoming a non-voting board member of Durham’s Red Cross through Fuqua on Board, you could start by writing about that time you set a donation record for your college’s blood drive by designing an innovative social media campaign, and your plans for doing the same at Durham Red Cross. Boom, there’s one example down AND you got to sell your niche social media marketing chops.
Social media marketing and content creation is becoming a big part of many people’s job descriptions, even beyond marketing-focused roles. Learning how to communicate the impact you’ve created using your social media skill set may give you that extra boost needed to stand out from the crowd when you’re applying to business school, and beyond.
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