It is a fact that 70% of job seekers find their desired jobs through people they know. This leads to the important question; how do I know or meet as many people as I can to help me in my job search? You may come up with many answers but I think the best one is join a social networking site and more specifically, Twitter.
For those less familiar with this social networking site, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows members to sign up and communicate with other members in 140 characters or less.
Like most job searching tools, used efficiently, Twitter can greatly revolutionize how you connect with an employer or recruiters who work for great companies in your locality. It is the best way to meet and network with people who can easily help you land your dream job.
To get the most out of this social networking site, you need to know a few things which will enhance your chances of getting instantaneous information to the available job opportunities. First, you need to create a professional twitter account. Use a good username for example if you are a doctor “@surgeon”, since this is the most visible part of your twitter profile. Include a professional looking photo or icon that looks inviting.
The second step is to make as many members as possible in twitter to follow you. Remember you want to “know” as many people as possible who may connect you to employers and help you land your dream job, the more the followers, the greater your chances. You can do this by following as many tweeters as possible by clicking the “follow” button on their pages, this is important because if you follow someone, most of the times they will follow you back.
The other important step to take is tweet daily or several times a day about your experience in your line of work, your expertise and other stuff that you are interested in, for example, you can tweet something like “Does anyone know a good company that is looking to hire graduate engineers?”. After posting such a tweet, you may ask your acquaintances to re-tweet it and you may never know who is out there, eventually, the right person will get it.
As a conclusion and precaution, make sure you maintain a good level of professionalism whether in twitter or other social networking sites to which you are a member, make sure that anything you post on the web is within the range of ‘acceptable’ to potential recruiters. Don’t go posting pictures of the crazy party you had last weekend or any other defaming videos. If you follow these steps, you will see the power of Twitter in finding you a job is pretty dazzling.
The following tools and links will help you to stay on the lookout for any job opportunities that may be broadcasted on twitter.
Tweetmeme
http://www.tweetmeme.com/
Tweetmeme is a service that collects all the links on Twitter then goes ahead to determine which links are most popular. This search engine is also able to group these links into categories, hence making it simple to filter and remain with only what you are interested in. It basically crawls the page you link to, indexing it, and adds it to its search database. This enables quite impressive real-time search results.
Twazzup
https://twitter.com/#!/twazzup
Twazzup is a popular real-time search engine which is great for keeping an eye on changing developments. It allows one to follow real-time stream of current updates. Based on the typed key words, the top tweets are shown alongside related pictures from twitpic.
Listorious
http://listorious.com/
Listorious has the one of the best Twitter people search on the web so you can find anyone by topic, region or profession -- powered by data from the tens of thousands of list curators. Once you find the right person, you can interview them by asking questions over Listorious.
Tweepsearch
https://twitter.com/#!/tweepsearch
Tweepsearch is basically a tool in twitter that allows you to search for keywords inside the bio/profile of other Twitter users.
Tweetgrid
http://tweetgrid.com/
This is yet another application that allows you to create a search dashboard in tweeter that updates in real time. It also allows for effective location searching via geocoding.
Good luck.
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