How I Use Twitter For My Career and You Can, Too
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This article is based on my experience trying to use Twitter to help write my own career story. Twitter was a little intimidating and confusing for me at first, so I’m recounting my successes and failures in advice form to help other people like me who are ready to quit being passive and unhappy with the direction other people are taking their career. In this new career climate, I’m learning I can make things happen myself.

Beginning At The Very Beginning


This is the story of a reformed Twitterphobe and how she’s in the process of writing her own career story.

Hi, I’m Jessica, and despite overwhelming career advice I’d read online, I was pretty much afraid of Twitter until two weeks ago. Most Twitter advice seems to be written by people who aren’t thinking like a beginner. They say you should get on Twitter to search for a job. Or to network. Or to become known as an expert. Or to further your career. But how do you get on Twitter?

It’s more than just signing up. I knew I needed the right username. The right tools to organize my account. The right followers. The right manners for tweeting. All of this, I’d been reading, would make or break my success on Twitter. This was a lot of pressure, especially given my particular employment situation that I wanted Twitter to help change.

Reading through the Twitter advice, I couldn’t find anyone’s voice that sounded like mine. These people already had lots of followers. They’ve already tried all the tools. They appear to be full-time tweeters. None of that described me. Even though their advice is helpful (and you should read it), I wanted to read guidance for very beginners.

I’m going to fill that void here. My two weeks on Twitter have already encouraged me, educated me, humored me, humbled me, excited me, challenged me, occupied me, surprised me and, most importantly, convinced me that it will lead to better things for my career.

So how do you get on Twitter?

Twitter username

Try to use your name in your username. I have a common name, so all of the good variations are taken. I got impatient and, in my haste to scratch the Twitter itch, chose one honker of a desperate username. Which leads to...
Don’t get impatient when choosing your username. The time you spend now to choose a professional username will pay off later when you don’t have to hurriedly change it, which I ended up doing that same day. This was after I’d started following people.

Tweet or follow: What to do first?

I think they both work out the same in the end. The advice I’ve read says to tweet for a few days before starting to follow anyone. That way they’ll have a sense of what you offer and be more inclined to follow you back. I did not do this. And after only two weeks, my following-to-followers count is virtually even. You’ll learn later how I made up for it.

All right, but how do I follow the right people?

Start by reading these lists to find people to follow for your purposes. Some will follow back right away. Most won’t. That doesn’t matter at all in the very beginning.

Because you’re using this Twitter account for professional gain, limit your fun follows. As much as I wanted to follow icanhazcheezburger, cakewrecks and gofugyourself, that would have created too much noise for not much gain.

Because you’re using this Twitter account for professional gain, follow all friends, former coworkers, anyone you know personally. If they think of you for any job opportunity, you want to be a tweet away.

TweetDeck: the not-at-all secret weapon to organizing tweets

Twitter is not useful without organization. And Twitter as it is has no organization. TweetDeck is one popular (the most popular?) application that sorts your followers your way. It also lets you tweet, retweet, DM and a lot of other things with almost no effort.

My first columns were Mentions, Direct Messages, Careerists, Jobs and Other. This sufficed in the beginning. Later, I merged Careerists and Jobs and split them into Don’t Miss and Maybe Miss. The way I am, though, everyone’s a Don’t Miss.

Listen As Much As You Talk


After setting up my Twitter account and organizing my TweetDeck columns, I considered the best way to establish myself as a member of this Twitter community I chose.

What to tweet when no one’s listening

If you’ve taken the “follow first, tweet second” approach like I did, you might have some followers before you even tweet anything. That might make you feel good, but I learned that if they don’t already know you, they’re not listening yet. So...

Don’t worry if you make some tweeting mistakes. My first tweet was something about my unemployment (because I was following job-search experts). Riveting, right? Who wouldn’t want to chat up someone who intends to talk about her unemployment?

Don’t be afraid to delete a tweet. I ended up deleting that tweet a few days later because my career coach suggested I use Twitter to move forward, not look back. I don’t hide my employment status on Twitter, but I’ve gone over it enough on this blog.

If you want to lay some groundwork, tweet about your blog (if you have one that’s relevant and professional). I didn’t waste any time promoting my blog, even if no one listened.

How I did it: “I started a blog right after being laid off to keep me thinking during unemployment. http://jessified.wordpress.com
“New blog post about returning to Twitter: http://bit.ly/1iuK4O

What to tweet to get people to listen

No matter how long you tweet about yourself or your thoughts, you’re not going to be on anyone’s radar until you let people know you’re listening to them. No point in wasting time; I started doing this on my second day.

The easy way: retweet. You don’t have to wait for someone to post something mind-blowing; if it fits your situation, if you identify with it, if you agree with it, if it makes you laugh, if it makes you think anything, retweet it. Just click the icon on TweetDeck and publish. You don’t even have to type why you’re retweeting it!

How I did it: “RT @jasonalba: Finding Target/Growing Companies – http://bit.ly/njBCu“

“People being too picky about jobs? Thought opposite was true. RT @cluewagon An Application is Not a Marriage Proposal http://bit.ly/rrHZI”

The flattery way: Mention someone. Flattery pays off on Twitter.

How I did it: “Searching @willyf’s One Day One Job for possible employers in my state. Useful information even if you’re not entry-level.”

The thoughtful way: Put yourself right in front of a person — reply directly to tweets or initiate your own conversation. If you’re following a particularly important or high-profile person you really want to notice you, ask a question, whether in reply to something the person tweeted or just one you have on your own. This has proven an excellent way of drawing attention to myself. And it’s an exciting feeling to snag a big follow just by being myself!

How I did it: “@jasonalba I wouldn’t count on it. Costco does not generally participate in the retailification of holidays.”

“@lagpsu Does “hand-delivered” include internal e-mail? I can’t always ask a contact to take time out of a busy day to walk my #resume to HR.”

Someone Will Notice You, But That’s Not The End


By this point, you might at least see why using Twitter for your job search/career advancement is way more fun than traditional methods. You can be yourself! You have easy access to influential people! When someone acknowledges your presence, you feel a small victory! And it is a small victory to get noticed among all the noise on Twitter.

How to get retweeted

Being retweeted is major because it means you said something that made someone want to tell other people about you. Just keep tweeting about your blog and about topics related to your goal on Twitter. Remember when I said last time that retweeting is a good way to get people’s attention and let them know you’re listening? You’re gonna know what that feels like when it happens to you!

How I did it: I don’t know exactly how I did it; it just happened organically. That morning, I’d tweeted about one of my blog posts, and that afternoon someone retweeted it. This wasn’t even someone I was following!

I’ve been mentioned in retweets several times, but this was the most exciting one. And, to be fair, I haven’t been retweeted in a while. Unlike what I thought would happen, retweets don’t snowball into sudden attention. Don’t take it personally when people seem to ignore you again. This is Twitter, after all.

I just found some links about how to get retweeted in case you get impatient:

How to get retweeted — the formula by Louise Doherty at TwiTip.com

How to get retweeted by Guy Kawasaki at OPEN Forum

What to do when you are retweeted: Say thank you!

How I did it: “@Barry_at_IMPACT Thanks so much for the RT!”

Three Ways To Make New Friends


So I started on Twitter with groups of pre-approved people to follow. Then I started gaining my own followers and followed some of them back. I kept my group fairly small (by Twitter standards) because I was having a hard enough time figuring out how to do this Twitter thing well. Now it’s time for me to go bigger. The group I’ve got going now is great, but I know there is more out there, and I need to target people now that I’ve found my voice. Sitting still is not the way to write your own career story.

3 ways to find more people to follow on Twitter

Almost every blogger is on Twitter. So my first step will be to see if I can follow any blogger whose blog I find via the people I already follow. If my pre-approved people like someone else, I might like that person. This might be an automatic for Twitter pros, but for someone like me, it’s a new thing to automatically think that I can follow someone. Usually, I just save the blog feed in my Google Reader.

TweetDeck lets you search for a word or phrase, so you can search for something you do, want to do, are interested in or are enthusiastic about. This method was tedious for me because some people made a one-off mention of the thing I searched for and some people don’t even fill in their bio line! I had to read everyone’s tweet stream to see if it would be a good follow.

Twibes is a Web site where you can type in keywords or just browse “twibes” to find lists of people to follow. The downside is the Twitter users in each twibe are self-added, so some are, to put it nicely, not relevant. But a lot are, and the browsing feature seems to be the most helpful for me (and also pretty time-consuming). I added a lot to my following list from this site.