How to Use Twitter for your Internship Search

Entry by Pat Patterson

In the July INTERNnetwork, I included some tips on how to use Twitter for marketing, networking, and research.  Here is a recap:

Some tips to build a professional Twitter profile:

– Use your real name,
– use a head shot photo as your profile picture,
– create a Twitter name that is appropriate and easy to remember,
– list a website for yourself – a professional profile such as LinkedIn, an online resume, an online portfolio, or your blog,
– customize your profile with a clean, professional design, and
– tweet about your interests, internship/career search process, articles related to your industries of interest, opinion on current events in your industries of interest, etc.

Besides acting as a marketing tool, Twitter is great for networking and conducting research.  Some tips on how to use Twitter to network and research:

– Follow individuals with similar interests,
– follow Twitter users who tweet about internship/career advice and who tweet about available internship/job opportunities,
– follow industry and market news that interest you,
– follow organizations in your industries of interest and key employees in those organizations, and
– join the conversation by re-tweeting (re-posting) what others tweet and sharing your opinion on others’ tweets.

Some of you may also know that Twitter can be used to search for an internship or job.  For those who do not know how to utilize Twitter in this capacity, here are a few ways you can do so:

– From your Twitter account, use the right-hand search bar to search for an internship or job someone may have tweeted about recently – for example, searching for “marketing intern” will provide you with real-time results of tweets mentioning the words “marketing” and “intern,”
– use http://search.twitter.com/ – you can use Twitter’s search website to search for an internship or a job the same way you would search using the sidebar search from your account.  However, with Twitter’s search website, you can perform an advanced search, narrowing your results to a specific phrase, location, or date,
– use http://www.twitjobsearch.com/ – this is a great resource, which will provide search results for tweets indicating specific internship and job postings, and
– create lists – you can create lists from you Twitter account to follow specific, related Twitter accounts – for example, you can create a list labeled “Internships” and include internship related accounts on the list to follow such as Indiana INTERNnet’s Twitter @IndianINTERN – when you click on your list, your Twitter “news feed” will only show tweets from those included on the list.

Do you have any suggestions on how to use Twitter for an internship search?  Let us know in the comments section.  Have a great weekend!