Blog [by] Chris Rouse

On January 1, I signed up for Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, there’s a good chance you have never heard of the Internet, Facebook, cable TV or people. I lurked on Twitter for a while before I actually posted something–I wanted to see if I could determine a value of this new medium before jumping on board. Now, I’ve passed the 2000 tweets mark recently.

Since my first tweet, I’ve covered a mission trip, birthday wishes, musical selections, food options, random updates, replies to people, re-tweets of others, made general observations, promoted things, attacked things, and recently started looking for a job.

The beauty of Twitter is that it allows networking to happen with virtually no effort on ones part. I attended a conference a couple weeks ago for church tech people and I met a couple dozen new people and added many of them as followers/people I follow on Twitter. Since then I have had a national network of people keeping their ears and eyes open helping me job hunt.

While at the conference I got to meet someone that I connected with during the summer over wireless RF issues while in San Diego (@rfninja). He works for Shure Microphones. He also recommended me for a job opening at a pretty well known company in the church production world. As I write this, I’m currently “It” in a game of phone tag with the president of that company.

Twitter also helped me get some temporary work at a local church here in Nashville so that I can make a little extra money and help them out where I can.

Tonight I opened up TweetDeck and I had an @reply from someone that is connected to me on Twitter via a few other connections with a job offer for a part-time sound tech position at his church.

Before I give too much credit to Twitter, I haven’t officially gotten a “real” job out of any of this yet, just a couple of offers. However, I haven’t received any offers via Facebook or LinkedIn, nor are either of those are easy to network on.

I prefer to network via Twitter because it allows for rapid communication with people and instant connections and there is minimal personal information involved. Granted, anyone following me, or who looks me up on Twitter, can see my 2000+ posts, they are only able to see one side of the conversation (unless they follow the people I follow or do a general search for my name) which allows for some privacy in a very public forum.

I’ve also made a few real-life connections with people I’ve met via Twitter, and there are still several more that I look forward to getting to meet one day.

All in all, for as narcissistic as Twitter can be, it can be an incredibly practical networking tool. Here’s hoping to landing a job via @twitter connections.

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Update:  Since posting this, I have started working at a church in Nashville, Long Hollow Baptist Church, part time. While I didn’t get this job directly thanks to being on Twitter and talking about needing a job, it didn’t hurt.  I was able to stay connected to a guy I knew there and talked about a possible future job opening there. Then I connected with the FOH guy via email, then Facebook, then Twitter, and filled in a couple of times mixing monitors at the main campus and FOH at one of the satellite campuses. And after a few dozen tweets about looking for work, I finally got offered a part-time job at the church.

Tagged: twitter, work