Job seeking from a hunters perspective Blog

Twitter is a good tool! October 22, 2010

Yes you heard me right I said TWITTER!

Now get over your misconceived notion as to what Twitter is or is not.

You are in Job hunt and every tool that you can use needs to be utilized.

Well guess what Twitter is one of those tools for you to use.

I hear that Sergent guy from the Military Channel and the Geico commercials.

Stop being a sissy and use the damn thing. (In his voice)

Twitter is classified as a microblogging tool. A tool in which to have a conversation in 140 character bursts.

You  have 160 characters for a name that begins with an @symbol. Example I am @evolutioncbl.

If I want to follow a topic or write about a particular topic I use a hashtag (#) example #career search or #Career advice.

Saying something in 140 characters is not that hard.  You would be surprised what you can say in that space.

Let me cover a few other things before we dive into this;

Tweet = what you say in 140 chars or less

@ = the user

# = the topic or subject

RT = retweet we get to this

DM = direct message

Mentions = when somoene else includes you or sends you a Tweet

TweetDeck = an app where you can organize Twitter into coloumns

Follower = people following you

Following = people you are following

PPL = people saves on chars

Chars = characters

w/ = with

Follow = select to follow somone

Unfollow = stop following somone

Block = Means just that block that person from you.

Twitter is a community in social networking so there are rules and etiquette that need to be followed.

You will be new to the community so be nice and on your best behavior. Engage in discussions and add value tweets to the community. Do not immediately jump in and ask for a job or help getting one as you will be shunned by the community. How will you know? Your list of followers will drop like a rock.

Do not talk about what you are doing like eating lunch while I Tweet. The reality is no one cares! Your Tweet needs to have value to it. As I like to Tweet on occasion,”If you do not have intellectual content it is words without power!”.

Think about that statement it says alot about how you should Tweet. A rule of thumb is if you do not have something smart or of value to say then don’t. Just putting out words is called noise and the community does not like noise.

If someone follows you then the respectful thing to do is follow them back. This is how you start your community.

Twitter provides a number of random people to start your community. Check out their profiles and determine if you wan tot keep them or to unfollow them.

For those you keep you can see who follows them or who they follow and build your community.

You can establish when you wan t to Tweet and how much your community will understand.

There is one application that I strongly suggest, TweetsMyJob.com. They wil want access to your Twitter account. It is okay I have used them for 2 years w/out problems. Set up a job alert and the Tweets will come to you and you can get a daily collection at the end of the day emailed to you. How cool is that.

Here a few more;

@careerbuilder

@jobhuntorg

@HeatherEColeman

@Employnet,

@ResumeStrategy

Also go to Search.Twitter.com and you can find more or just sue the search box at the top of your Twitter home page.

Search Brazen Careerist they are on Twitter.

So get started and have fun. You know I am out there usually during the day.