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- by Charlotte King
- In Student Life
Posted Feb. 6, 2015
Twitter: Perfect for Postgrads or a Procrastination Tool?
I know it is difficult to believe sometimes, but there is really more to Twitter than fake celebrity profiles, revolutionary plotting and Stephen Fry. Done properly, the social media site can also be a crucial tool allowing any student to fully engage with their studies and ensure themselves their perfect career when those studies are over. Done badly, however, and entire weekends can be lost to finding the most fascinating - yet niche - accounts. Read this guide to Twitter and discover the pros and cons to Twitter as a student, and how you can improve your Twittiquette to get higher grades and land that dream job.
Twitter’s benefits and disadvantages can often be identical. On the one hand, everyone is on Twitter, meaning you can get minute-by-minute updates from your ideal line of work, or from experts in your field conducting experiments, discussing their work and answering questions from followers. On the other hand, everyone is on Twitter, meaning that despite your best intentions to read the feeds of your field’s top writers, you can find yourself wandering ‘I wonder what Paul from S Club 7 is up to now’ and an hour later you know nothing more about your field but know the activities of every pop star of the mid ‘00s.
As Twitter’s strengths and flaws often have the same root, you need a solution that offers you the best of both world. You don’t need to stop tweeting, you just have to start tweeting, using the advance features of the social network. One such feature that solves the problem from the above paragraph is lists. Twitter allows you to make lists to split up the people you follow into separate feeds. For example, divide into ‘field’, ‘fun’ and ‘friends’, meaning that Twitter can be useful to you without sucking all the fun out of it.
On the subject of lists, another that is crucially important to have is career. We’ve previously covered how to use social media in general to find jobs , but Twitter offers many more possibilities for the career-conscious postgrad than simply showing you what jobs are available. One of its great strengths (and, again, one of its weaknesses) is that you can talk to anybody, so if you know who you want to work for why not engage with their Twitter? Commenting insightfully on their posts allows said employer to get to know you, and shows them that you know what you’re talking about in the field and are confident in communicating about it, all ideal things to show that you are the perfect postgrad for the job.
With this, however, comes a decision on what you want to use your Twitter for. After all, when a company becomes interested in this person who is contacting them, they are bound to look further into your Twitter feed. Yes that’s right, all the way through your feed, through those pictures of that particularly bad-taste prank you pulled on your flatmate and your increasingly inebriated livetweet of ‘Lord of the Rings ’. As such, you have to ensure a certain professional image on Twitter, whether by having multiple accounts (with the incriminating ones set to private) or by using social media accounts with better security options for your interactions with your friends.
In essence, Twitter is simultaneously your best friend and worst enemy when it comes to studying and employment. So ensure you follow some of our advice to make the most of the sites professional and fun elements, and read our sister guide to this about whether you should be tweeting on the world’s ninth most used social media platform.
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Twitter’s benefits and disadvantages can often be identical. On the one hand, everyone is on Twitter, meaning you can get minute-by-minute updates from your ideal line of work, or from experts in your field conducting experiments, discussing their work and answering questions from followers. On the other hand, everyone is on Twitter, meaning that despite your best intentions to read the feeds of your field’s top writers, you can find yourself wandering ‘I wonder what Paul from S Club 7 is up to now’ and an hour later you know nothing more about your field but know the activities of every pop star of the mid ‘00s.
As Twitter’s strengths and flaws often have the same root, you need a solution that offers you the best of both world. You don’t need to stop tweeting, you just have to start tweeting, using the advance features of the social network. One such feature that solves the problem from the above paragraph is lists. Twitter allows you to make lists to split up the people you follow into separate feeds. For example, divide into ‘field’, ‘fun’ and ‘friends’, meaning that Twitter can be useful to you without sucking all the fun out of it.
On the subject of lists, another that is crucially important to have is career. We’ve previously covered how to use social media in general to find jobs , but Twitter offers many more possibilities for the career-conscious postgrad than simply showing you what jobs are available. One of its great strengths (and, again, one of its weaknesses) is that you can talk to anybody, so if you know who you want to work for why not engage with their Twitter? Commenting insightfully on their posts allows said employer to get to know you, and shows them that you know what you’re talking about in the field and are confident in communicating about it, all ideal things to show that you are the perfect postgrad for the job.
With this, however, comes a decision on what you want to use your Twitter for. After all, when a company becomes interested in this person who is contacting them, they are bound to look further into your Twitter feed. Yes that’s right, all the way through your feed, through those pictures of that particularly bad-taste prank you pulled on your flatmate and your increasingly inebriated livetweet of ‘Lord of the Rings ’. As such, you have to ensure a certain professional image on Twitter, whether by having multiple accounts (with the incriminating ones set to private) or by using social media accounts with better security options for your interactions with your friends.
In essence, Twitter is simultaneously your best friend and worst enemy when it comes to studying and employment. So ensure you follow some of our advice to make the most of the sites professional and fun elements, and read our sister guide to this about whether you should be tweeting on the world’s ninth most used social media platform.
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