Here's how you can leverage social media platforms for job searching after a programming field layoff.

Your social media profiles are often the first impression you make on potential employers. Ensure your LinkedIn profile is up to date with your latest skills, projects, and experiences. Highlight your programming expertise by including relevant certifications or languages you're proficient in, such as Python or JavaScript. Tailor your profile to reflect the jobs you're seeking; use keywords that make you discoverable to recruiters looking for your specific skill set. For eg, update your headline to something like: "Experienced Full-Stack Developer | Node.js | React | Seeking New Opportunities." Add a summary that highlights your career achievements and goals.

To leverage social media for job searching after a programming layoff, optimize your LinkedIn profile, join industry groups, and follow companies. Engage by sharing relevant content and networking with professionals. Use Twitter to connect with influencers and companies, and utilize Facebook for tech job groups. Showcase your coding projects on GitHub and actively seek referrals. Build your personal brand and demonstrate your expertise to attract potential employers.

Take note of which social media profiles you use for business and personal. If you mix them, you may want to make a new one for business. Rarely will you be judged on your follower count for a job. But the content? Yup. To build content on your business profile, share links to articles or news that is relevant and has meaning to you. It will demonstrate the content that you care about. Share links to projects you've done. Not just a general link to your GitHub, but every day or two, post a link to one of your repositories. Make a note about what the project was to you. Example: Reflecting on my projects: Day 3. This next project looks so trivial now, but I made this project to help me visualize *some concept* <link to GitHub repo>

With your business profile, search for hashtags, explore profiles, and start following people with content that you like. Don't just randomly follow every programmer or developer. Think of blogs, writers, coders, or companies that have great content. You'll start getting recommendations of people to add. Before adding them, browse their recent content and see if it's content you would want to see on your feed. Don't just follow big accounts. Look through the comments and find people you think you might connect with. Engage in the conversation, meaningfully, and send them a follow request. If you simply like what they wrote but have nothing to add, like their comment and follow. Look for comments you can engage with. Then engage.

Besides sharing your own original content, repost content that would interest the type of people you want following you. But avoid sharing click bait articles. If the content ultimately is good, but the link itself is click bait, try to find that same article from a more reputable site. It probably exists. Basically all click bait articles are copies of real articles, presented in a way that exposes you to lots of ads in order to view the full article. Sharing content posted by other people is a way to quickly add content to your profile. But as I said before, spread out your content. Try to limit yourself to sharing only a couple posts per day. You can bookmark things and share them on a day you don't have anything else.

I covered this already, but follow companies that are relevant to your work and interests. You can follow other companies, too. But definitely follow the companies you are interested in working for. Following code camps, Convention accounts, and other targeted companies account will benefit you. Some companies have dozens of accounts. You wouldn't be interested, for example, in all of the foreign accounts for different countries. Most special interest projects have their own accounts. This is for your benefit, as you will rarely be judged by the accounts you choose to follow.

Touching back to what I said about following and engaging relevant content, be sure that your engagements are meaningful. Whether you're interested in knowing more about a comment someone made, or you want to contribute to an existing comment, do it properly. If you disagree with someone, or even if their comment is just false information, don't appear arrogant or condescending. "This is incorrect. While 7/22 has often been used as a replacement for pi, it's only accurate for 2 decimal places. Pi is the direct relation of a circle's radius to its circumference. An interesting detail about pi is that the size of the circle does not matter. More than a fraction, pi demonstrates the relation of the radius to the circumference of any circle."