Blog Post: Cool Tools for Your Career: Twitter

It’s been maligned as useless, self-indulgent and worse, but Twitter and other microblogging services have become very popular since Twitter’s inception in March 2006. The whole concept is to report on your status or communicate with your “followers” (those who sign up to receive your “tweets,” as such postings are known) in 140 characters or less—the same upper limit as a text message on your cel phone.

Twitter users are still evolving how they employ this tool to boost their career, but Anne Zelenka had some good ideas in a post made last year to Web Worker Daily, including:

• Make existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate
• Get questions answered quickly and less intrusively
• Find out when your colleagues are available for an instant message chat
• Create an ad hoc back channel at conferences

Christina Laun, writing at College @ Home, posted a guide earlier this year for Twittering librarians that has many tips for Twitter usage that can also work for other professions. Particularly interesting are her suggestions that librarians use the service to catch up on their news reading (many major news sites have Twitter feeds), have Q and A sessions with patrons (giving them a better idea on what services are most requested by their customers) and using it as yet another outlet to announce library events such as book sales and in-branch programs. She also has some very useful links, such as this LifeHack blog post on using the service productively.

This is all great stuff, of course, if you already have a job. What about job seekers? Deb Dib at job-hunt.org has a great article on how executives can use Twitter to facilitate their career search. She suggests that executives use Twitter to try out versions of their brand statement or value proposition, post comments on current marketplace issues, deliver subject matter expertise, and engage in lots of on-brand activity that raises awareness of the seeker’s existence, brand, and value.