Use Twitter to Boost Your Brand—and Yourself

When Michelle Barna saw a job opening at a mobile technology company posted online, she didn’t send in a typical application. Her resume and cover letter included 67 characters, and links to her YouTube page, blog, and other work samples. There were no salutations, no pleasantries, not even a mention of her full name. Not that this was inappropriate or unusual; Barna, cloaked in the moniker of MissSarcastic, applied via Twitter.

“They said it was the best [application] they received,” she remembered. She then went on an interview, and, as any polite applicant would, sent her thanks afterward. Barna tweeted: “Just came back from a job interview and met a handful of wonderful, intelligent, and witty tech folk! Can’t get better than that!”

Although she hadn’t directed the tweet at her prospective employer, he noticed anyway. “The guy who interviewed me said, ‘Thanks for the tweet, that was awesome,’” she added.

Job tweeters, such as go2JobBoard, recruit not just for such amateur Internet personalities as Barna, but also for positions such as one for a senior sales associate at the Vancouver Aquarium. And people who already have jobs use it to rub shoulders with people they’d like to impress. Not that there’s anything novel about networking. Twitter, however, gives these interactions a casual tone that blurs the line between personal and professional communications. And that, say experts, has the potential to change the way we do business.

There's Something About Twitter

Twitter’s meteoric rise is something of an enigma. Although it launched in 2006, it was mainly home to bloggers and early adopters until last year, when its membership mushroomed 1,382 percent, from 475,000 accounts to more than 7 million. As of this writing, the site Twitdom counted 934 desktop and mobile Twitter applications.

What’s more, the site’s functionality quickly leapfrogged over—but not past—mundane updates about grocery store runs and coffee breaks. Citizen journalists have used Twitter to report on several major stories, posting the first pictures of US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River and providing breaking updates on protests in Iran.