Stumbled upon this article about getting noticed and getting a job via Twitter. Perhaps social media channels should not be viewed as a distraction anymore, but more-over being used in the most productive manner and in this case, landing a job.
Source: Nicky Branagh of StudentBeans
So you’ve mastered the art of Facebook and amended your profile settings to private in order to prevent potential employers from getting an eyeful of those Carnage pub crawl photos. Right? Right. While a social network like Facebook isn’t seen as the best resource for job hunting, Twitter - Facebook's often misunderstood younger brother - can actually be the best place for it.
Why? Twitter is widely used on a professional basis and is a cheap way for businesses to communicate vacancies. Furthermore, it allows you to promote yourself to an expanding network of individuals and recruiters and join online conversations you might never otherwise have the opportunity of joining.
So what can you do to increase your chances of finding work via Twitter? We’ve come up with a list of top tips to help you in your hunt for a job when using Twitter:
1. Keep it clean
First thing’s first. If you’re looking for a new job and are hoping to attract the attention of potential employers, keep your content clean - much like you might keep your Facebook profile private. Many employers now do social networking background checks on potential candidates so be wary of your online presence and the type of image you are sending out. Whether you use your Twitter account for personal/business or strictly business use is up to you. There’s no harm in mixing it up, so long as you ensure your content is of the ‘employer friendly’ variety.
2. Be informative
Use your Twitter bio as a selling point. Keep it brief but inform potential followers of your area of expertise. Be sure to use a photo too - the more professional looking, the better. It is also wise to include a link to your website/blog (if relevant) so that employers can instantly find out more about you.
3. Follow the right people
Don’t wait for people to come to you. Search to find the people, brands or businesses that you’re professionally interested in and follow, follow, follow. They may not follow you back in the first instance but this doesn’t prevent you from engaging in conversations with them on a professional level so make people aware that you’re there (without pestering too much). And hey, there’s nothing to say you can’t follow Kanye West or Kim Kardashian too.
4. Post frequently
As tempting as it is to simply sit and watch others have Twitter conversations, doing so is of little benefit to you (entertainment aside). Start interacting with these people and answer questions they ask, if you can. The best thing about Twitter is how easy it is to engage with others so take advantage of this and make yourself known. You don’t always need to have direct conversations either. Try increasing your profile with links to useful articles or similar and retweet things that you think will be beneficial to your followers - you never know who might be reading.
5. Save searches
Of course, Twitter is not always guaranteed to deliver the goods as and when you want them. If you’re hitting the job search hard then use Twitter applications to your advantage so you can keep an eye out for any potential opportunities. Twitter apps such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite are ideal in this instance because they allow you to save searches for particular keywords and have any tweets that mention them collated in a separate column to your regular timeline.
So, for example, say you wanted to track any administration roles that might pop up on Twitter, you may save a search featuring the words ‘vacancy’ and ‘administrator’, which you can scroll through in your own time.
6. Search hashtags
Like saving searches, searching hashtags allows you to view tweets which have been specifically labelled with certain topics. You might want to try putting hashtags such as ‘#jobs’, ‘#recruitment’, ‘#hiring’, ‘#nowhiring’ in the Twitter search bar. If this isn’t fruitful enough however, you could be more specific with the type of job you’re looking for, by searching something such as ‘#journojobs’.
7. Interract
Twitter is networking gold so be sure to use it to its full potential. We’re not saying you should hound every single person in the profession you’d like to get into but keep up interactions to remind people of who you are. Twitter effectively enables you to eavesdrop on loads of conversations at once (and who doesn’t love that?) so be sure to get involved every so often and, if you can, direct people to some of your work through links.
8. Make long-term connections
Keep up communications with potential employers and you could end up with an interview on your hands. If you develop a good relationship online, you might also use this contact to get in touch with people they might know with professional openings or even use them as a source of knowledge to help you out with the job-hunting and interview process.
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