Career Advancement With Twitter

Like it or not, we live in a day and age where technology has become a huge part of our lives. There is almost nothing that we do these days that does not involve some sort of technology. This is becoming especially true when it comes to career advancement.  I already mentioned how social media can be used by recruiters, but it can also be used to help job seekers as well. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming popular destinations to quickly find out about the latest open positions at nonprofits. So how can you best utilize social media in your career planning?

There are many social media sites at your disposal, though it might be a bit overwhelming to use all of them.  If you had to choose one for your job search, however, it should be Twitter.  There are already a number of nonprofit organizations that utilize Twitter to broadcast their latest jobs, so it provides a great opportunity to quickly get a heads up on the latest nonprofit jobs.  Once you have set up your Twitter account, the next thing you need to know about are hashtags. Hashtags are best known as this symbol (#), and in Twitter, they are used to tag your 'Tweets.' The minute your Twitter profile is set up, you should do a search for #nonprofitjobs. This is the hashtag that The Nonprofit Jobseeker uses when we post the latest nonprofit jobs on our Twitter account, and it is also used by other nonprofit job boards. You should follow all of these Twitters; now, anytime they tweet about a new non profit job, it will automatically be posted to your Twitter feed.

Of course, there is more to helping your career advancement using social media than following people on Twitter. In order to get the most out of this useful tool, you need to use it to its full potential. This means you need to interact with other Twitterers who have similar interests to you: in this case. So after you are following all the job boards/nonprofits you want, you should begin to search for people who are also looking for nonprofit jobs, or even those who have them already. Twitter is very helpful in this respect, because they have a list of people you should follow, based on the people you are already following. You should make conversation with these people, asking them how they found their jobs, and if they could give you any career advice. Who knows, maybe you will find your next job by talking to one of thse individuals. You can almost look at like networking, without all the traveling!

With millions of people using Twitter today, you will find that it is an invaluable tool to advance your nonprofit career. Maybe you have had reservations about joining Twitter in the past, but today is the day to put those misgivings away and take your career advancement to the next level.