How to use Twitter in your jobsearch

By Neil Patrick and Axel Koster

You may think that Twitter isn’t the most obvious way to find a job. After all how can a message of 140 characters really carry meaningful influence or effect on your job search?

But I disagree. You’ve just got to know how to do it right. So today I hooked up again with my good friend Axel Kőster at the Manhattan Group to share some insights on this topic which we hope are helpful.

1. Twitter is a superb networking tool if you approach it as such.

The most valuable resource any jobseeker can have is a large and powerful network of people that are potentially helpful to them. In this post I described how Linkedin is ‘high stakes’ social media. What I mean by this is that if you try to connect with a high profile person directly on Linkedin, there’s a chance, even a probability that unless they already know you, they’ll decline or ignore your invitation to connect.

On the other hand, Twitter is 'low stakes' media and hence an easy way of connecting. If you show interest and support for a high profile person, they will notice you if you do it consistently over several days or weeks and will probably follow you back. From that point it’s an easy step to escalate your connection onto LinkedIn.

You’ll find that many recruiters are on Twitter too and to help you, I have set up lists of them organised by continent here. Just select the ones that are interest to you and you can follow them and see all their tweets about the jobs they are recruiting for.

2. Don’t use Twitter to ask for a job, use Twitter to show what you know

Our second tip is to keep your Tweets focussed on a career topic which is close to your area of interest and expertise. Describe this in your Twitter profile. To be brutally frank, no-one cares that you love your wife or have three wonderful kids or enjoy travelling. If that’s what you want to tweet about, that’s absolutely fine, just don’t expect Twitter to help you in your job search.

On the other hand, if your Twitter profile tells people that you are a professional fitness trainer, or compliance specialist, or electrical engineer, now you are talking the right sort of language to connect with others who for whatever reason share your interest or expertise.

So use your Twitter profile to describe what you do professionally and you have made the first step in turning it into a professional networking tool.

By the way, I don’t think this is the place to brag about yourself. Plenty of folk do, but personally, I believe we should use our twitter profiles to say what we do and make ourselves appear approachable, not conceited. Who loves a show off after all? Much better to talk about all your accomplishments on LinkedIn.

3. How to Tweet

Sharing the tweets of others who you admire in your industry is a great way to build your network and influence. But don’t just do that alone. Create and share insights and opinions of your own. Ask questions. Engage with the people that show interest in what you tweet, even if it’s just a friendly acknowledgement.

If you are using it to help you find a job, never use Twitter as a way to let off steam about something that’s really made you cross. Equally, don’t allow others to draw you into Twitter arguments. Twitter is thankfully fairly troll-free when you are using it professionally, but if someone does turn hater on you, take the argument offline or simply walk away and ignore them. You gain nothing by having a fight in public!

So, be friendly, be helpful and you’ll steadily build influence for the right reasons.

4. Leverage Twitter

You can and should connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. If you have a blog, connect that too. Here’s the thing; encouraging people on twitter to connect with you on LinkedIn sends a powerful message to LinkedIn. LinkedIn sees that you have a steadily expanding network of great contacts. This in turn is interpreted by LinkedIn that you are a more influential person and your ranking in LinkedIn search rises accordingly. So you get found on LinkedIn by more recruiters.

Adopt the mantra of paying it forward. Help people out whenever you can. You may not see a benefit from this straight away, but it’s surprising how building a base of goodwill within your following pays you back over time. It’s a leap of faith, I know, but it really does work. You’ll just have to trust me on this one!

Recruiters look at Twitter when they are checking you out. And if they see pointless babble about TV shows or whatever, it won’t help you. It may not especially hurt you either, but it’s a missed opportunity to show that you are an engaged and influential thought leader in your profession.

Finally, don’t interpret this as meaning you gotta be all serious all the time. This is social media after all, so don’t get all heavy. Try to show a bit of your personality and let that shine through.

5. Learn from your peers

None of us can ever know everything but if we are connected with the thought leaders in our industry, we can discover great new insights, opinions and ideas. So Twitter can be a great learning resource if you adopt the right strategy about who you follow.

But you can go further than this. Follow the businesses on Twitter that you are interested in and you’ll get some valuable insights into what they are doing and possibly even some of the problems they are facing. And if you discover a problem that you can help them solve, even if they are not recruiting, how valuable is that knowledge as a basis for a speculative approach to explain to them why they should be talking to you?

6. And finally, use tools to help you.

Twitter is frankly a bit of a bear to use professionally unless you make use of tools to help you. But the great thing is that there are lots of them, most of them are free and have really simple and intuitive interfaces. You just connect them to your Twitter account and off you go!

Last but not least, here’s Axel’s advice on using Twitter to help your job search, plus his thoughts about a couple of really useful tools, Hootsuite and TweetReach: