Twitter, Hashtags and Your Job Search

Twitter and Hashtags

How can using Twitter and understanding hashtags help you in your job search?

I want you to think of Twitter as a giant chat room. Messages fly back and forth around the world—and many of those messages contain hashtags.

What the heck are hashtags?

Hashtags are just a string of letters and numbers proceeded with a “#.”

Who owns a hashtag? NO ONE!

Can you register a hashtag? NO!

How do I know what #hashtag to use? Go to hashtags.org and see how a hashtag is being used.

Some hashtags would seem to be pretty obvious but, for example, I focus on the baby boomer generation. You would think that I could use the #boomer hashtag and everyone would find my tweets.

Hmm…not so fast. If you search hashtags.org for #boomer, you would discover it is primarily used to tag tweets about the University of Oklahoma Boomer Sooner sports teams and events. I hadn’t considered that! Since I live in the heart of Texas Longhorn country, I rarely think of Boomer Sooner.

I use the hashtags #babyboomer and #babyboomers instead.

But, I still do not see how I would use them…

Twitter is a giant database of messages. You can search Twitter to find announcements and posts. In my last post, I wrote about Twitter Lists and your job search.

You do not even need a Twitter User ID to search Twitter. Just go to the Twitter Search Page.

Try this: Click here to search on #Austin #Jobs #ProjectManager

Swap out #Austin with #YourCityorLocation.

How do I know what hashtags to use when searching for a specific job? Go to hashtags.org and try different combinations.

If you search on #productmanager you will find it is almost never used. You might have to use a combination of hashtags like #product #manager.

What other hashtags can you suggest?

This can be done through trial and error. In my searches, I find Austin job tweeters use:

• #jobs #austin
• #job #austin
• #atxjobs
• #hiring #austin

Once you found a tweet announcing a position, you will want to follow the Twitter account. You may want to consider adding them to one of your Twitter Lists that you created from my last post.

What other questions do you have?