How to leverage Twitter to build a professional network
A couple months ago, I participated in a panel discussion hosted by my old university on the subject of finding a job in Germany as a non-German. When posed the question what advice I would give current students to prepare themselves for the German job market, I had a somewhat unusual piece of advice: join Twitter.
You see, Twitter has become extremely useful to me in my professional life. I use it to find contacts and professional opportunities, to promote my projects, and to stay updated on what other people in my field are writing and talking about. It’s also become a sort of icebreaker when networking casually at events – I frequently meet people who say “oh, I’ve been following you on Twitter for a while – it’s nice to finally meet you in person!”
(If that sounds like a humblebrag, or an outright brag, please forgive me… personally I’m just grateful that, thanks to Twitter, people have started to approach me rather than forcing my socially awkward ass to approach others)
I’d even say Twitter played a major role in me getting the job I have now. And so for these reasons, I recommend to most people looking to start a new professional journey that they consider creating a profile or, if they already have one but aren’t doing much with it, that they start using it more meaningfully.
As such, here are a few tips based on my personal experience about how to get started using Twitter with an eye toward building your professional profile. Specifically, this advice is focused on how to build up your Twitter network and what kind of low-threshold content you can immediately start to produce. If you’re already reasonably well-versed in Twitter, you may not find this advice particularly illuminating or groundbreaking.
Essential context to this advice: this is based on my experiences as a young person living in a big, international city with a vibrant local community for my topics of interest (government and technology, open data, civic tech, etc.) and an even bigger international community around these topics. Obviously, the extent to which Twitter could be useful for someone’s career is highly dependent on the field in question and whether there is an existing community to tap into. I am most frequently giving this advice to people who, like me, studied public policy, and here I’m quite confident that there is a Twitter community for practically every possible concentration in this field (international development, anti-corruption, security policy, etc.). But when it comes to fields like the hard sciences or, say, literature, it’s hard for me to say the extent to which this advice might be relevant.
So how can you use Twitter to build up a following in your field and strengthen your credibility and overall professional profile?
1) Attend events relevant to your field and tweet about them (ideally using the official event hashtag).
A tweet I made during an open data / open government-related conference in Hamburg in November 2019.
Whether it’s a multi-day conference, an evening lecture or an informal meetup, tweeting insights from events is an excellent way to garner attention for yourself among others in your field. When you tweet from an event, you become a sort of reporter on the ground, and you have a chance to become a source of valuable, interesting content that potentially no one else is providing. Depending on the event in question, there may only be a small percentage of participants posting content about the event on Twitter, and then of course there’s no guarantee they’ll all post the same content – one key snap of a particularly interesting slide paired with an attention-grabbing quote from the presentation can lead to yours being the one tweet that gets shared by a host of people from your field. If there is an official event hashtag provided, use this to increase the likelihood your tweet is found by people interested in this event, either through Twitter’s search function or through event organizers retweeting posts from others using the official hashtag.
Posting tweets from an event may not amount to much more than some likes and retweets, but it may also start a conversation – for example, if someone sees your tweet and has a question about the content presented, or if they have an additional comment or critique to add. For added potential reach, be sure to tag the speaker (or their organization) in your tweet – speakers often will retweet posts related to their presentations, since they like the exposure as well!
In addition the potential for your content to be shared among peers, if there are other people at the event using Twitter, a particularly insightful or clever tweet can be a reason for them to approach you later – and suddenly Twitter is helping you build your in-person networks, too.
2) Retweet interesting papers or articles (or other content) from people in your field, but add your own comment or observation.
A tweet I made sharing a thread on the impact a lack of data standards is having on communciations around fires in Australia.
Doing this has two advantages: first, you get to start to create a profile for yourself in terms of what topics you find interesting that can make it easier for other people to decide if you are someone they’d like to follow (if I see someone routinely shares content that is interesting to me and that they usually offer a brief summary or assessment of the content, I find that appealing, because it can help me stay well-read and informed in my field).
Second, when you retweet an existing tweet, the author of the original tweet will get a notification. If you add your own comment to the retweet (e.g., “Great article from Jane Doe on open data in Germany: we are still lagging far behind other countries, and evidence shows things are getting worse, not better”), and the person you are retweeting from thinks your comment or observation is interesting or compelling (or just makes them look smart), they may then retweet your comment. This gives you additional exposure in a the online circles of your field of interest.
3) Engage with thought leaders from your field.
Similar to the above point, identify who the people in your field are who are publishing studies, writing articles, or otherwise have relevant things to say – and engage with them. Ask a follow-up or clarifying question to something they have published and promoted on Twitter, or maybe relate their points to your own experiences. Obviously don’t just write something to them for the sake of it – if you don’t have something meaningful to say, don’t waste their time. But this is another good way to start to raise your profile in your field and signal that you are someone that has meaningful input to provide.
4) Find opportunities to highlight interesting developments in your field that may not be known or accessible to everyone (e.g., content that was originally published in a non-English language).
A tweet I wrote highlighting a case where a local Berlin newspaper had used open data to identify areas with particularly low vaccination rates.
For this to be effective, you already need to have built up a small following, so if you’re not there yet, focus more on points 1-3. But something I have found to be very effective in raising my online profile is taking content relevant to my fields of interest that is originally published in German – news articles, studies, blog posts, etc. – and sharing that content with a brief English summary of its findings or what is interesting about it.
Similar to tweeting from an event, here you have an opportunity to produce potentially unique content, as well as to appeal to experts in your field: just because someone is an expert doesn’t mean they can speak enough of a given language to understand what an article is saying, or that they are tuned-in to the happenings in a specific region. You have the opportunity to be a bridge between peers in your field and your linguistic or regional areas of expertise.
In my field, I’ve found that a non-insignificant amount of people outside of Germany are interested in what’s happening in open data or digital government in Germany, but there isn’t always a lot being written about this in German. Highlighting and/or summarizing interesting developments from Germany that are not otherwise available in English has been a very effective way for me to drum up attention and interaction on Twitter. This also has the added advantage of potentially building up a reputation as a “regional expert” in your circles – I now frequently have people from other countries reach out to me when they’re trying to get a better understanding of the German or Berlin open data or digital government scene.