Are you a twit?

In some sectors, such as technology and public relations, using web-based tools such as social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook and Bebo) as part of your job hunt has become very popular over the past couple of years. Twitter is the latest online bug to catch on and is currently in vogue, but if you have not heard of it don’t worry, there are (only) an estimated 30 million users of Twitter worldwide at present, compared with approximately 150 million people who are on Facebook, so it is still a nascent application.

Twitter is a free service that allows users to publish short messages of 140 characters or less, so it is similar to the average text message on a mobile phone in size. These messages are read (usually on a computer or a mobile phone) by "followers" — people who make a conscious decision to subscribe to your messages and have them delivered to their own Twitter home page or PDA. Each message you post is known as a "Tweet". The easiest way to understand it is to go to www.twitter.com, click on the "Join the Conversation" button in middle of the page and get twittering by following a well-known celebrity (we recommend Stephen Fry’s, which is one of the more popular and active ones). Joining Twitter has value for many people.


From a job-seeker perspective, however, Twitter is just another tool that can help employers and employees to connect, alongside snail mail, email and telephones. It can also be a big waste of time if people in your sector or your function do not use it. Even if they do, you need to understand how the medium works and how best to utilize it.

People in a particular industry (say engineering or software development) often use Twitter to keep up with news, opinion and happenings in their field, but job searching is ‘on the fringe’ of what Twitter is really about. So you have to be careful about what you do, when you do it and who you do it to. Twitter has swiftly developed its own twitiquette!


If you do want someone to think about you when a job opening arises, you need to get that person to follow your tweets. When you first join Twitter, you will be prompted to look for friends in your Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail or AOL accounts so you can begin following them if they are already on the service. This means that your existing network of contacts can be used right from the start and you can invite people to follow you.

Another way to get going is to identify the key people in your industry who are twittering and watch their updates closely to see what types of topics and projects interest them the most. You can use a search facility to identify those who have similar interests to your own, and can scan their public profiles to see if you should be following them. Start following others, and then invite them to follow you.

You have to build your follower list on Twitter before you need them and one Twitter expert advised us that those in Silicon Valley who have used it for job purposes claim you need to build a database of up to 500 twitter followers before you can even attempt to start using it for job search purposes. One Irish politician we know tried to use Twitter to attract votes in the recent elections, but found that only 12 people (mostly journalists) followed them! Not only was it ineffective, it was also embarrassing.


If you do decide to follow people in your industry and you'd like them to follow you back, make thoughtful replies to their tweets and supply them with valuable content and insights. Avoid messages like “I’m going to a meeting or conference on …”. A good way to show mutual respect is to share links to useful content you read on websites, blogs (including your own) and other sites that might be of interest to the person you are following e.g. “interesting article on PR in the technology sector on Ireland.com business pages today”.

So much for the do’s, what about the don’ts? Do not, as one of our clients did recently, overtly use the network to try to set up lunches, meetings and interviews at the start. Another sound piece of advice is to avoid bad mouthing previous (or current) employers.

Above all, do not become a bird-dog. A bird-dog is someone who is singular in their approach to others on twitter - the online stalker. Being on the receiving end of a bird-dog is equivalent of being cornered by someone you do not want to talk to at a networking meeting, or having a job-seeker constantly nagging you on the phone. Twitter carefully!