Using Twitter in Your Job Search

Twitter is one of the most effective social networking sites you can use for your job search. It is an extremely helpful tool to connect with others and identify new opportunities. Here are some tips to get started!

Make Connections and Establish Relationships

With Twitter, success in your job search is not dependent on the number of followers you have or the number of people you follow. It’s about the quality of the connections you make. It is more important for you to have ten engaged followers than a million who aren’t paying attention to you.  To start building your followers and determining who you want to follow (specifically targeting those who could help you in your job search) you can:

  • Tweet on a regular basis about topics that interest you.
  • Follow the links that others tweet and read/process the content. Then add commentary in a reply tweet.
  • Use hashtags to tag your tweets so that other people know what your content is about and it becomes easily searchable
  • Solicit resources from colleagues or start a conversation with other like-minded professionals
  • Find influential tweeters in your industry and start following them so that you are aware of industry trends, breakthroughs, and challenges
  • Join twitter chats and contribute your opinion in real time
  • Watch the trending topics and make professional comments to stay involved and visible
  • Show your personality through your tweets while still being professional
  • Identify industry-specific job sharing accounts so you can stay up-to-date on new opportunities
  • Follow the organizations that interest you or that you want to work for, and engage with them!

Use Hashtags Strategically

It can be difficult to cut through the “white noise” generated by such a big network of people. To focus your attention on the best people and content to support your job search, try using hashtags to filter out the noise. For example, if you’re tweeting an article about getting a summer associate job at a law firm, you might want to add the hashtags #summerassociate, #jobsearch, #career, or #legaljobs. This way, you’re information will show up among others searching for those topics, including potential employers and recruiters. You can also use those same hashtags to narrow down the news and information you follow and build a community around similar interests. Most importantly, you should be using your hashtags strategically. Do some research on the most commonly used hashtags for your industry of interest, and don’t use too many in each tweet. Two or three hashtags per tweet is enough.

What Not to Do

It’s just as important to consider what NOT to do when getting started with using Twitter for your job search. Our top tips include:

  • DON’T use applications that let you auto-follow and auto-unfollow other people
  • DON’T send more than ⅓ of your tweets about you and what you do, have variety in the type of content or images you share
  • DON’T use all 140 characters every time. If you do, people will have a hard time retweeting you. You can use a site like bit.ly to help shorten any URLs.
  • DON’T automatically send direct messages to everyone who follows you, unless you have something meaningful and unique to say to the follower.
  • DON’T tweet about meaningless things. Personal updates once in a while are fine, but keep your tweets focused on something interesting to other people.
  • DON’T feel that you need to reply to every user that mentions you. If you want to reply to someone, focus on the people who took the time to personally send you a direct message first.
  • DON’T forget that you are on Twitter to establish yourself professionally. Make sure your Twitter profile is filled out completely with a profile image, header photo, summary, location, and links to your other social networks (especially LinkedIn) are correct.
  • DON’T be offended if someone unfollows you. It’s all part of the process.
  • DON’T get lost in the popularity battle. Focus on content, not follower ratios.