Blog Post: 10 Tips To Twitter Your Way To Jobs

So what is the big deal about Twitter? There are so many headline stories about Twitter. Some say it will be gone tomorrow and don't waste your time. Yet it keeps growing dramatically and companies are using it to "tweet" their jobs. When I recently signed up to blog with Jobing.com, Andrea Hoffman told me they have two people devoted to social media which I know includes Twitter. So just how do you tweet your way to a job? Here are ten tips to Twitter your way to jobs.

1. Just go to www.Twitter.com and choose your screen name of up to 15 characters. If you are "branding" yourself, you can choose your name if it is available. Or choose a title that describes what you do. You can always change your screen name.

2. Upload a professional looking head shot that you use in all your social networking sites. This also shows consistency in your brand and helps people recognize you.

3. Although this should be your lowest priority (but hey it's fun), you can choose a free background at http://www.twitterbackgrounds.com and you'll have a big choice. I chose one that matches the colors of my website. Remember to keep it professional.

4. Put your job pitch in your Twitter bio. You have 160 characters to write your elevator pitch. Make those characters count. Cut out unnecessary words.

5. You have one link so make it a good one. Use it to direct people to your LinkedIn profile or your resume. A good place to create your online resume is www.VisualCV.com. Plus you can download your LinkedIn profile right into Visual CV so you have a great start to your online resume.

5. Tweet about your jobs, your aspirations, your interviews, etc. Keep it all positive - no one wants to read about your negative experiences. It's okay to occasionally tweet a link to your resume.

6. Which comes to the next topic: the @ which is a mention, RT (retweet) which is used to show that you are tweeting content that has been posted by another user and DM is a Direct Message. So if you see an @ before your Twitter screen name like @joguerra (my screen name), someone is mentioning me or sending me a message that everyone can see. DM is a direct message between me and another Twitter user and is actually D joguerra. So a D then space and the screen name. When people RT or retweet your posts, thank them. It's the social media thing to do.

7. Show you are an expert in your field by tweeting interesting comments, article links, blog links in your industry. Use Google alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts to look for interesting articles and "tweet" the link with a comment. Use keywords in your industry to set up and receive alerts via email or add it as a "feed" to your reader. If you don't understand the feed, don't worry. Just have an email sent.

8. Look at hashtags (#) in your industry. Hashtags are a powerful, simple tool for tracking topics, live events or breaking news. Go to http://hashtags.org/ and enter #jobs. You'll see a list come up with all type of jobs. This will give you an idea of how to search. When you click on the results, you will be taken to another page that shows all the jobs relating to the hashtag with links to the actual job.

9. Use Twitter search to find information on jobs. Go to http://search.twitter.com and enter keywords with your industry, zip, city, job titles, etc.

10. And lastly, you can get lost in cyberspace as you find interesting links to articles as well as a lot of unnecessary junk. So limit your time on Twitter. It is very helpful for finding a job, but can also be a big time bandit.

I could go on with pages of information as there is so much more to Twitter. So I'll be posting more tips in the future.