navigating twitter

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to guidance counselor 2.0. Well, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had guidance counselors in middle school. We had guidance counselors in high school, but we didn't really have guidance counselors in college and now as professionals. We don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vacovac.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email social media at tdsintdesse. And then finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. So let's dive in. So Twitter. All right, so I'm going to share my screen. I want to go over Twitter together real quick. And so yes, we'll do that central. Hey, listen, listen, don't get me started on some wine. I love I literally went to Austria so I can drink all the wine in Austria.

It was great. All right, so I'm going to share my screen. And we are going to go over kind of the basics, not kind of. We are literally just going to go over the basics of Twitter. So remember to share my screen here and then for people on TikTok, I'm sorry. It is what it is. All right, so Twitter, all right, so let's go over the importance of it. Right? So this is incredibly important. I'm going to walk through kind of how to build a Twitter profile. So the banner cover photo, it's so funny that LinkedIn and Twitter, both text heavy platforms, both have a visually like a visual appearance at the very, very top.

And so you really need to take advantage of it. Here I would put something about you, right, and dear yourself to your followers, right? Again, Twitter is Twitter is, so I use this comparison all the time. So if you are on a lake and you are floating on a lake on a raft, you typically don't really go anywhere, right? You kind of stay put, but you typically don't go anywhere. If you're on a raft on a river, you move, you move with the river, right? That's kind of the same thing like LinkedIn and Twitter. Like LinkedIn, you can post something and the post kind of sits there and it gains likes and comments throughout the day.

It's really great. That's why I always preach to LinkedIn to post more on LinkedIn if you are starting your content during your starting to put in information because you can post once and it just, it kind of stays there, right? Twitter though, Twitter, you got to keep at it. It is a river, it is a babbling broken, it goes away. But the thing is though is you need to draw people in your profile immediately, right? So the banner photo is incredibly important. It's what I talk about with LinkedIn. Try to bring something about you, right? If you were a former chef, if you were a, I don't know, a former hiking person, I don't know what, but like put that in your banner photo somewhere.

Link, the profile pick, again, incredibly important. Listen, listen, profile picks, so important these days, right? Your headshot is like the single most important part of your virtual name and who you are because this is the first impression somebody sees of who you are. So my question to you is if you were a hiring manager, how, what would you think of your picture, right? Put yourself in a hiring manager's shoes. That's incredibly, incredibly important. So profile picture, incredibly important. So let's talk about the title portion, right? The title portion, again, LinkedIn and Twitter have similarities, a ton of similarities when creating your Twitter profile. So the Twitter profile, the title portion, which is the same as the LinkedIn portion, you need to talk about either who you are, what you do or what you tweet about.

So let me say that again. You need to talk about who you are, what you do or what you tweet about. So for me, mine says 5,000 software developers met in counting. So like what do you get when you read that? Well, damn, Taylor's met like fuck ton. It's a Friday, sorry for the cursing. Taylor's met a fuck ton of software developers, right? That immediately catch. So this guy obviously must be saying something that he's learning, right? The next thing, trying to make hiring in the software industry easier for candidates and companies. Okay. So this guy's met 5,000 developers. So we obviously knows what he's talking about to a certain extent.

And he's trying to help the software industry be better for candidates and companies. And then it says follow for all my secrets. I'm going to follow this guy, right? Again, so it's writing a paragraph. I don't know if you learned this in paragraphs. Like, yeah, hey, Chris just said this up there. You're on Twitter, throw up your Twitter handle. Since Taylor's talking about Twitter, let's follow each other on Twitter, throw up your Twitter handle everybody if you're on Twitter. But so the title portion of the comment point and go back to Andre is a profile picture important. Listen, here's the deal. I think it is, right?

If you don't like like profile picture yourself, I understand. But again, like it depends what you want to use it for. If you want to use, if you want to use your Twitter just for fun and tweets about whatever you want to tweet about non professional, it doesn't matter. But if you want to turn, if you want to turn your Twitter into a professional account to talk about professional related things, I would absolutely have a profile picture. All right. So that's the title portion. The next thing, so location, I think it's important to put location. I really, really do think so. The reason why I think it's important to do location is while we are in a virtual world, I still want to know where you live.

Right? Because I could potentially get you connected to other people. Let's say you live in New York City. For example, there's a recruiter I got in touch with today. There in New York City, I knew that I got them connected with our New York City office. So again, I would put your location. That's just me. I said free resources. Right. It's a way to direct more traffic to my link. Obviously. And so I think the link is incredibly important on Twitter too. The link is important because that is a way for you to include your GitHub or something to get people over to something else outside of Twitter.

Right? So I'm incredibly important. I have the newsletter feature on mine. Not everybody knows the newsletter, but if you are going to start a newsletter, I think review is a great service within Twitter to start up a newsletter pretty quickly. And then finally, let's talk about in my opinion, in my opinion, the single most important part of a Twitter profile is the pinned. You can pin a tweet. And it is the one tweet where you can do anything to show who you are. So for me, I have a little sizzle video that I partner with a local creative here in Nashville with. And if you watch this sizzle video, it just says who I am, like my mission statement.

Right. So this way when you hit my Twitter account, you know exactly who I am, what I do, what I stand for, and hopefully that invokes a follow. Right. So I'm going to be able to do that for you all. Any questions? I see people throwing up their Twitter handle. I love that so, so much. Let's see here. I saw a tweet come through on here. Sweet. I see Michael Poston his Twitter handle. I love it. All right. So let's go on. All right. So you created your Twitter profile, right? So you like take all this over the last like seven, eight minutes. And you're now like, all right.

I want to create a Twitter. I, how do I use it Taylor? So I created it. How I use it? Great question. First off, go to lists. Right. So it's more and lists. Right. List is incredibly important. So if you see here, now I don't know how lists pull from, but I do know, I think that list pull from your similarities. Right. Now you may have to go find stuff, but you can find my list as well. But I don't Twitter in my perspective. I don't need to highlight lists more because it's a wonderful, wonderful way. It's a wonderful way to get started with a community.

Right. So Twitter is about finding communities. Right. A lot of people on Twitter like is like, I don't know how to use it. Do I tweet? Do I not tweet? What do I do? Here's the deal. Twitter, certain simple. You've got to find, you've got to find communities. And the way to do that is list. Trey goes right here. Trey goes, I have a list called Devs Meeting Devs, if anyone wants. I love it. I love it. Go follow Trey. Trey, did you throw up your Twitter handle? But I would highly recommend checking out that. Right. For me, I have Taylor's Tech. I need to really spend time updating this because I have a lot more friends now and tech than I do when I created this.

But there's 96 members. So there's 88 people. So this is kind of fun too. You can actually get people following your list as well. So not only can somebody follow your profile picture, they can follow your list as well. And so people, there's 88 people on the Twitter sphere that follow my list. And so check that out. Taylor's Tech is a really good start. It's 96 members that I really appreciate. And again, I need to add to that. There's a lot of friends that I've made that I haven't added to yet. So lists are an incredibly important part. Another thing too is I do want to talk about just the power of the way Twitter works.

So right here, Dev, it's good to see you. So Dev right here, so Twitter actually prompts stuff. Do I follow Dev? Dev, I don't follow you. Man, my apologies, dog. That's terrible. But here's the deal. Twitter suggests people to follow. So I engage so much with Dev. I thought I already followed him, which is another power, which is I give a shout out to Dev because he's always engaged. And I think I already follow him. Right? So again, but Twitter recommends that I want to show another thing too. Let's see here. So Twitter, again, if you like and comment, right? I talk about liking and commenting all the time.

If you see right here where it says James Quick and Becca HW like this, right? So I don't follow. OK, so I don't follow Anna, right? Anna popped up onto my profile because two of my followers liked her stuff. So again, it's the same similarities as LinkedIn, right? We're commenting and engaging is just the same as tweeting, right? So many people are like, Taylor, I don't know how to tweet. I don't know what to tweet. And that's totally fine. If you literally look, if you literally look at my screen, again, Twitter and TikTok, you can't see my screen, but it's the same thing, right? And again, you can literally not tweet a single thing and just comment and like other people's posts and being incredibly, incredibly successful.

I'm going to see another one too. Again, right? Liking like Twitter pushes stuff. So if you're on it long enough, it's great. I do want to say this, right? So there is something called communities. I have not been successful yet with communities. If anybody has is using communities well, please comment. I would love to interview you for a few minutes on this show in the future. If you are using communities well, so the communities in my perspective is more of a lockdown place. So you can pick the people and then you can just kind of fire off random tweets. Like I know I'm a part of some developers communities that like is their personal and they post about their family and their kids and like how they hate their jobs and all that stuff.

And I see it, but not many, but not everyone sees it. I think of Twitter as like broadcasting it broadly. I think communities is like getting away from what the ethos is of Twitter and that's just kind of posting something just letting it go. But again, communities, maybe be a part of some communities. If you see it right here, there's a world community, AWS community, a centered community. I mean, there's just this job, a script. So like you can go be a part. I can go be a part of web three developer relations and I can ask to join. And then I get all of these tweets, right?

Again, I want to reiterate, I think the common misconception is Twitter is just this like, is just this like, you should tweet all the time and it's just like gobs of information. It's really not. Twitter is slowly kind of building some discord like features with lists and communities where you can really hone in and get really intentional. Like for me, if I was a job seeker, I would try to connect with as many people and I would try to get into as many communities as possible. And if you're a react native person, look, there's literally a react native community to be a part of. So all right, so we've checked out lists, we've checked out communities, right?

So now you're like, well Taylor, well, how about posting, right? What do I post? How do I post? Listen, Twitter is like, Twitter is a wild west man. Like post whatever you want to post, right? To me, I have people that post their thoughts on software languages, right? I post about resumes and LinkedIn's and a variety of other things. Here's the deal with Twitter though to be successful. And I'm interested if anybody has any thoughts on this, but to be successful on Twitter, you kind of just got to like live on it. Like you kind of got to live on it. And you always got to have it up.

I always have it up. I'm always liking and commenting. Twitter for me. Okay. All right. So here's another analogy because I feel like I try to bring a lot of analogies so you can understand people who don't understand Twitter can like wrap their head around it. For me, Twitter is like going to a tech conference is like going to a conference and it's and it's the hallway tracks. It's the conference it talks. So like if you tweet, it's like almost giving your own talk. And then if you're in the communities and lists and engaging with people, that's like the hallway track for conferences. Is that following for everybody?

So you kind of got to be on Twitter 24 seven. And if you're like, Taylor, I just don't have the time to do that. And I understand Twitter is not for everybody. But to me, somebody said earlier, it's like a really, really good place to have real conversations and to network. Dev comes in and goes agreed short, but frequent seems to be the game. Yeah, shortened frequent, right? Short and frequent. I love that. I also want to go over hashtags. So Mohammed on my Twitter spaces, I do stream this on Twitter space. If you can never make the video portion of this, you can follow along on your earbuds on Twitter spaces.

But Mohammed brings up a great thing. So I do want to go over, I don't have my keyboard accessible to me, but you can search hashtags up here. And so that's so that's incredibly important to be able to search hashtags. And one of the one of the common ones is 100 devs, right? 100 devs is a great hashtag to be a part of. You know, one thing I talk about, one thing that's asked me a ton is do you need, um, do you need, um, to put hashtags in your post? I think like, I think if you use 100 devs or a trending hashtag, I think that could work, but I would not put hashtags on every single tweet.

I think it actually, I don't know this for certain, but I tried to do it early on. And I swear my tweets were suppressed. Um, so I would not put hashtags. People find you, they just do. They, I mean, literally if anybody tweets and I like your posts, your posts are going to show up at some way, shape or form with my 11,000 followers, right? So that's just how it works. So you just got engaged comment like, um, do you need to live on LinkedIn like you need to Twitter? No, Bobby makes it great. I'm going to stop sharing my screen here for seconds. It's where close to wrapping up.

Bobby, Bobby makes a great point. You don't need to live on LinkedIn like Twitter. That's why I like LinkedIn for people who are getting started on their content journey or getting started posting about their career and stuff. Live on just post on LinkedIn. You can post on LinkedIn once and it, and it just, it does great. Right. LinkedIn rewards. Actually, I'm just, I'm maybe making this up. Linked in from the algorithm perspective to me. It seems that if you don't post a lot, it actually rewards you more. Cause it pushes you and wants you to be on the platform. Right. If you're just getting started on your content journey on LinkedIn, you're probably going to have some pretty good success from the start.

But no, you don't need to live on LinkedIn like Twitter. Um, I want to see if I can get one started for Louisiana devs at Baton Rouge, Fest. Yeah, Trey. Hey, Trey pops the, props to Trey. He's got the mindset. Right. This is what it's all about. I created a recruiter meet up in Nashville because there's no community, right? Build community. Trey, I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing. Um, Kevin goes, I keep thinking the time invested networking takes away from the time I'm teaching myself. She's sharp. Listen, it's a balance, man. I mean, listen, I'm not going to, I'm not going to beat around a bush.

Uh, it's, it's difficult, right? Like you're probably like people are like, I have a full time job. You know, that's not in tech. How do I learn tech and network at the same time? Very intentional with your time. Very intentional. I say this all the time when you're on the toilet. What, what app are you on on the toilet? Right. Just to be totally frank with you. You're scrolling through TikTok, get off TikTok and network on Twitter and LinkedIn for however long you're on the toilet. Right. So 100 devs. I love it. See 100 devs again. Yeah. Hashtags are trashy. Yeah. It gets super annoying and super cluttering.

People will probably stop following you. So just use a hashtag like once a day that's applicable to maybe a hot hashtag that's going on. Um, let's see here. Uh, Trey, I need to check that out. I don't know what that is. I mean, I check that out. Um, James comes in here and goes, I get far more traction on Twitter than I LinkedIn. Yeah. Again, listen, it's, I would say experiment. Um, but yeah, I would, I would definitely, I have. A lot of my businesses come from Twitter. A lot of my business has come from Twitter. Um, let's see here. Yep. So he linked it.

I love this. I'm on chest.com on the toilet. I mean, hey, listen, to each the round. I love it. All right. Cool. Any last questions. So that's it for today. I want to hit Twitter really fast. I talked about hitting Poly work, but we're not going to hit Poly work today. Um, just because of time and I want to keep it short and simple to the point and get y'all on with your Friday mornings. Um, but thank you for hanging out with me this morning. I appreciate it. Again, Morgan will be on the show in upcoming weeks. I'm going to slowly start showcasing my team so you can get to know my team because the way it works is if you need me as a job seeker, I'm going to get you introduced to my team.

I physically cannot work with everybody that I want to work with. Um, with kind of what my day today as, as, as, as a manager and also creating content. So I want, I want, I want you all to get to know my team. So in case of you ever come to me and I pass you off, you know who Sloan is, you know who Matt triggers is, you know who Ralph, like you know Jordan, my entire team on Drake. So again, thank y'all for coming out today. That was it. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. If you got something out of this, please share this with somebody.

People don't know how to use Twitter. So if you've got something out of this on LinkedIn, please share it. Um, and y'all be safe this weekend and we'll see you next week for a busy, busy week. Appreciate y'all more than you ever can know. Thanks y'all. Have a good one. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why. There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store.

I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving it, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T-DESS and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.