Twitter Tips to Supercharge Your Job Search
If you’re not using social media to advance your career in one way or another then you’re already missing out. The truth is that being digital can get you a job, or in some cases, cost you your job if used irresponsibly. With over 500 million tweets being sent every single day, Twitter is arguably the best social network, besides LinkedIn, for your job search.
Twitter can become a noisy place, but if used correctly it is an almighty tool, not least for discovering your next career opportunity and building your personal brand. Here’s some ways to make the most of the platform and find a job using twitter.
Make the most of your personal profile
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again; your digital footprint has a major impact on how you’re perceived by others. Your personal brand is hugely important when searching for a job and your twitter profile is a key component of this.
Pick a great handle
Ideally, you’ll be able to claim a twitter handle that has some relation to your name. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to get @firstname or even @lastname. But search around for a combination that works for you. The trick is to keep it short if possible as your twitter handle eats into the 140 character limit when people mention you in a tweet. You cannot use full stops but you can use underscores and numbers if necessary. By way of an example, I have a particularly common name, Andy Parker, so I eventually settled with @ParkerACS; Parker being my surname, A being my first initial and CS being my middle initials. It’s not ideal but it does the job.
Bio Description (Keyword & Hashtag Optimised) & Location
The bio description has an allocation of 160 characters; just slightly more than a tweet. Make the most of this space by communicating who you are and what you do, succinctly and with some personality. To optimise this space, why not include a hashtag of your skill set or interests such as #marketing, #UX or #mobile to name a few examples.
If you happen to be publicly looking for a job then it’s a good idea to actively state this in your bio as it makes you more discoverable in search to recruiters and hiring managers. “Seeking Opportunities”, #HireMe, #JobSearching or #JobSeeking are all good additions.
Profile Picture
Your profile picture on Twitter is not as much of a make-or-break deal as it is on LinkedIn. However, for your personal brand it can always be worthwhile keeping your profile pictures consistent across platforms. This way, once somebody has found and added you on one platform, it makes you infinitely easier to identify on others. A clear, friendly picture, 400x400px is perfect. In their book, ‘The Art of Social Media’, Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick recommend that profile pictures should be asymmetrical as this makes the person look more likeable. (For more tips from the Art of Social Media, have a read of our favourite 11 tips in this post.)
URL
The URL included on your profile should be an extension of your personal brand; ideally linking straight to your personal website or LinkedIn profile at the least. This is an opportunity for anyone who visits your twitter profile to click through and learn more about you as a professional.
Header Images, Colour Schemes and Background Image
Your profile can be further customised through the use of theme colours and additional images. This is where you have the opportunity to demonstrate your personality. Pick a theme colour that is easy to read and complementary to the colours in your profile and header image.
Optimised your profile? Great, time to move on to the tactics.
Follow & Follow Back
During your account setup process, twitter should guide you through the process of following a number of accounts of interest. Following accounts is what will populate your feed with their tweets. Here’s what type of accounts you should follow in order to get more from your feed.
Industry News & Blogs
Start out by following some of the industry news sites and blogs. They’ll be the accounts that are sharing up to date info and insights to keep you posted with the latest happenings in your field. The beauty of twitter is how ‘real-time’ it is. Often news will break on twitter, long before you will find it anywhere else. There’s a lot of value in being first to jump on a hot-topic of discussion.
Influencers
Next up, you should dig around and find some of the industry influencers. If you have followed people on your LinkedIn page, or even on Facebook, you should follow their twitter accounts too. You can use tools such as Buzzsumo or Right Relevance to find influencers in your niche. Not only does twitter offer the opportunity to learn from these influencers, but twitter provides the opportunity to interact with these people more than any other platform.
Companies of interest
As part of the process of researching a company during a job search, you should always check out their twitter profile. Beyond a quick check, often companies will post their job opportunities to twitter before anywhere else. Following these accounts will give you an unparalleled advantage in uncovering these opportunities.
Employees of companies of interest
Going one level deeper, why not follow the employees of companies of interest. This will give you a further level of insight into what their interests are and what they’re up to. This is a great hack for doing additional research into the culture of the company to help you find a team you fit with.
How to get tweeting.
Share insights
Twitter is a place to share short, sharp sound bites of 140 characters. To make the most of the platform for building your personal brand you should aim to tweet industry relevant information, provide commentary on topics of interest and demonstrate your interests and knowledge. Tweet links to blogs and articles you have read, facts and statistics you have found intriguing and quotes or snippets that others will find interesting. Your aim should be to educate your followers on a topic that you know about; your profession and industry of choice.
Ask questions
Asking questions is a great way to generate engagement. Either tweet a question publicly or direct it at a specific account using the @mention function. This is your opportunity to learn more from accounts you follow and spark a conversation.
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Asking great questions is an excellent way to build your brand.
Engage and build rapport
As well as soaking in the knowledge and insights from the accounts that you have followed, you should also begin to engage with them. Reply to their tweets, retweet their insights, favourite things that interest you. If you do this consistently with accounts that are of particular relevance to you then you will build rapport with them over time. This is increasingly valuable for your social influence and will build employers’ curiosity in you.
Hubspot employee David Khim even suggests that you ‘tweet a tease’ to an employer if you are going to be applying. In his post, “How I stood out from 437 applicants to land my dream job” he explains how he tweeted the hiring manager to let her know that she should expect an email from him later that day. The informal environment and immediacy of twitter made this a great tactic.
Attend events and live tweet
“Twitter is the cocktail party of the Internet. It gives people the permission to jump into conversations and (hopefully) provide value to those involved.” - Gary Vaynerchuk
As this quote explains, twitter offers a unique opportunity to be involved in any conversation you so wish. As you hopefully already know, attending events and networking is crucial for your career. A great way to leverage twitter is to live tweet what is happening at the event. If there is a speaker on stage, tweet their quotes and attribute it to them. Join in the conversations on the event hashtags (more on hashtags below) and provide value to your followers that you are getting from being at the event in person. This a great way to get noticed by other attendees, the speakers, organisers and your wider audience; who knows what doors these people could open for you.
Use the advanced search functionality to power up your search
By going to twitter.com/search you can delve much deeper into the twittersphere than what is surfaced in your personalised feed.
Hashtags are used as a way to categorize tweets. They are the most powerful way to uncover tweets all related to the same topic. Hashtags serve different purposes; some are short term, others are ongoing. You might choose to jump onto the hashtag for an event you are attending as explained above or use the hashtag for a news story that is breaking. Other times you will use hashtags to look at the tweets coming from a topic more generally such as #marketing or #PR.
For job searching on twitter you can use hashtags to search for relevant tweets to the opportunities you are looking for. There are many variations that you might choose to search. Let’s take a look at an example:
If you are looking for marketing jobs in London you could search for
#marketing #jobs #london
or
#marketingjobs #london
Keywords are also important and the advanced search facility is very powerful. Give relevant terms a test and see what comes out. There are many, many jobs posted to twitter and the search functionality allows you to discover these.
Create lists to stay on top
When you begin to follow a lot of accounts, your feed can become noisy and it can become difficult to discover the information most relevant to you. The way to beat this is to segregate accounts you are interested in into lists. You can add an account to a list by clicking on the cog next to the follow button on their profile and selecting “add or remove from lists”.
The other great thing about lists is that you don’t have to follow an account in order to add it to a list. This means you can create relevant lists without bloating your own feed. You could create lists for “industry influencers”, “industry news”, “people I admire”, “people I would like to meet” or any other list you can think of that would be useful to you. Lists can be both public or private, so if you don’t want other accounts to see that you have added them to a list, then set the list type to private. That said, it can be powerful for other people to see that you have added them to a list. It gives them a sense of belonging and will make them curious as to who the curator of the list is, further building your brand awareness.
You can explore your lists as an enhanced, more curated feed, enabling you to consume content and interact more efficiently with other accounts.
Find the right tools for the trade
There are many, many different tools out there to help you get the most from Twitter. From Buffer, to Hootsuite, to Topsy, to Tweetdeck. Many of the tools have overlapping functionality but personally, I believe that tweetdeck offers a great way to view your curated lists, track hashtags and keywords, as well as scheduling tweets to be published in the future. It’s versatile and is a great place to start. I suggest using it alongside Buffer as a starting point. These will give you the leg up you need to keep engaged whilst building your personal brand, and allowing you uncover those opportunities.
Top tip: Using tools to assist in managing your twitter account can make your workflow much easier however don’t be tempted to fall into a trap of simply automating all of your posts. It’s important to show a human element. You can do this easily by providing commentary on an article rather than simply sharing the link and title to it. Using tweetdeck enables you interact with other users rather than simply segregating your feed.
Advertise Yourself!
As an advanced tactic, you might even choose to advertise yourself on Twitter. You can pay to promote your tweets to a specific audience. I have seen it in the past where someone has created a promoted tweet asking for employers to check out their website, stating they were available for hire. If you’re trying to get into digital marketing this is a particularly effective strategy; demonstrating your art in order to find a new role. Food for thought.
Throw in a dollop of your personality
As a final point to remember, there are so many uses for twitter that it can feel daunting. What to share, what not to share? However, in your pursuit for a new role, don’t be afraid to show your personality. Don’t be shy about tweeting things that interest you aside from your professional work. Be human and be kind and don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your Grandma (or boss/future boss) to see; just a few easy-to-abide-by rules. As mentioned before, social media can unfortunately cost people their jobs.
Include your Twitter handle on your CV or Portfolio
If you feel confident that your twitter profile is an asset to your personal brand then there’s no reason you shouldn’t include it on your CV or portfolio. Just as you should include your LinkedIn profile URL and personal website URL, it will give employers the opportunity to get to know you better. It’s worth noting here that if you’re applying for roles where being digitally literate and the use of social media are important, then your personal twitter account can provide evidence to an employer that you are competent on the platform. That said, if you’re applying for digital marketing or social media management roles and your personal account has just a handful of followers and sporadic tweeting, then this will probably be perceived as a negative signal. However, if you’re sharing interesting insights, commentary, and interacting with relevant accounts — regardless of the role you are applying for — it could tip the scales in your favour when they’re making a decision on inviting you to interview.
There you have it. I hope that has given you an insight into how to use twitter to find a job. Hopefully it has also demonstrated the power of the platform and its relevancy to your job search; particularly in today’s climate in 2015. If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter, and its future potential, I would urge you to read “What Twitter Can Be” by Chris Sacca, an investor in Twitter.
What tips have you seen job seekers use? Have you used any to particularly good effect? Let me know your stories or questions in the comments section below.
Note: This post was originally published on 15th June 2015.
