Have you started dabbling with Twitter in your executive job search, but finding what a time drain it can be?
A century before Twitter and social media, Thomas Edison cautioned:
“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose.”
Busy c-level and senior-level executives are always pressed for time. Add in a job search, and time gets stretched to the limit.
But don’t despair. And don’t give up on Twitter.
An excellent job search tool, Twitter is a powerful place to:
- Build credibility, visibility, and evangelism for your brand and ROI value to your target employers,
- Extend your online footprint,
- Conduct industry and company research for due diligence,
- Position yourself in front of employers and hiring decision makers.
- Connect with new communities of subject matter experts and thought leaders, and
- Uncover opportunities that may lead to landing a job.
Realize that, unless you have a realistic strategic plan for your social media and brand communications, you’ll get distracted and waste way too much precious time.
If you can devote just 15 to 20 minutes a day . . . or even every other day or so . . . you can benefit from using Twitter.
Some tips to limit your time on Twitter:
- Don’t waste time tweeting about personal issues or where you’re going today.
- Keep your tweets relevant to your brand and ROI value as a job candidate.
- Use Tweetdeck or another Twitter app to help you organize and manage the list of people you’ll follow, and to set up tweets in advance to post throughout the day.
- Do your thank you’s for retweets, #FollowFridays and mentions all in communal tweets, once a day or only every few days. No need to thank each person in a separate tweet.
In a word, one of the best and quickest ways to tweet is to retweet (RT) others, but retweet with a purpose.
When you RT, always give attribution to the originator by including their @username. You’ll stay top of mind with them because they’ll know when you retweet them.
And a few ways to find quality tweets to retweet:
- Search Twitter for your target list of companies and key decision makers, follow them and retweet their tweets.
- Search for, follow and retweet thought leaders in your industry.
- Search hashtags (#) on Twitter for tweets that include your relevant keywords.
- Set up Google Alerts for your relevant keywords (including your target companies’ names, services, products and c-suite executives’ names). Google emails you links when those keywords show up online. Tweet those relevant articles and blog posts.
Related posts:
The Biggest Mistake Twitter Newbies Make
How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand
14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter
photo by Rosaura Ochoa
