No Time For Twitter How to Tweet Less, But Tweet Quality - Executive Career Brandâ„¢

No Time For Twitter How to Tweet Less, But Tweet Quality In preparation for an upcoming  call to  a new client prospect,  I Googled his name. My search revealed that, along with a complete profile, this CMO in telecommunications had a Twitter account. I was impressed. It’s unusual for the c-suite executives I work with to pay any attention to Twitter. But then I took a closer look at his Twitter profile. He had only one tweet . . . from about a year ago . . . and was following fewer than 10 people. When we spoke, he explained his lack of activity. My daughter told me I had to be on Twitter, so I signed up, but I didn’t have any time for it, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I cautioned him that, in his job search, recruiters and hiring decision makers at his target companies would be Googling his name, just as I did, and would land on his Twitter profile, and make some kind of judgement about him because of it. Merely having an account wouldn’t prove that he was social media savvy, which was his goal. In fact, a Twitter account with no activity could be detrimental to him. An excellent job search tool, Twitter is a powerful place to: Build credibility, visibility, and evangelism for your brand and ROI value to your target employers, Extend your online footprint, Conduct industry and company research for due diligence, Position yourself in front of employers and hiring decision makers. Connect with new communities of subject matter experts and thought leaders, and Uncover opportunities that may lead to landing a job. This CMO’s complaint is one I hear often from executive job seekers â€" Twitter is a time-waster. Sure enough, unless you have a realistic strategic plan for your social media and brand communications, you’ll get distracted and waste way too much time. I reassured him that he would benefit from using Twitter if he could devote just 15 to 20 minutes a day . . . or even every other day or so. Some tips to limit your time on Twitter: Don’t waste time tweeting about personal issues or where you’re going today. Keep your tweets relevant to your brand and ROI value as a job candidate. Use Tweetdeck or another Twitter app to help you organize and manage the list of people youll follow, and to set up tweets in advance to post throughout the day. Do your thank you’s for retweets, #FollowFridays and mentions all in communal tweets, once a day or only every few days. No need to thank each person in a separate tweet. In a word, one of the best and quickest ways to tweet is to retweet (RT) others, but retweet with a purpose. When you RT, always give attribution to the originator by including their @username. You’ll stay top of mind with them because they’ll know when you retweet them. And a few ways to find quality tweets to retweet: Search Twitter  for your target list of companies and key decision makers, follow them and retweet their tweets. Search for, follow and retweet thought leaders in your industry. Search hashtags (#) on Twitter for tweets that include your relevant keywords. Set up Google Alerts  for your relevant keywords (including your target companies’ names,  services, products and c-suite executives’ names). Google emails you links when those keywords show up online. Tweet those relevant articles and blog posts. Related posts: The Biggest Mistake Twitter Newbies Make How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand 14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter photo by Rosaura Ochoa 00 0