With all its downsides, social media has proven to be a life-changing medium. While there are seemingly countless examples of how social networks have sparked romances and friendships, I’ve found that the impact social media leaves on your career isn’t given enough attention.
My story alone isn’t too wild: My past two roles are tied directly to my tweeting habits, but after a bit of research, I discovered that this is more common than you might think.
Illustration by: Chris Visions
According to Courtney Boyd Myers, the founder of Audience.io:
I was very lucky to get my job at The Next Web through Twitter. When I saw The Next Web was hiring, I tweeted at @Zee to “Hire Me!” Then I flew across the pond to meet him for a cup of tea. He was keen and told me to fly back to New York City and be their East Coast Editor. I’ve been Tweeting quite a lot ever since!
I’ve also done a fair bit of hiring through Twitter. I’ve met a number of freelance writers on Twitter who’ve joined our team at audience.io and my current London-based marketing strategist was the first person to welcome me over Twitter when I moved to London. Little did she know that one year later we’d be working together!
Makeshift founder Stef Lewandowski shares a similarly powerful story:
Paul Birch, now my co-founder at Makeshift added me to a Twitter list called “Suggest we meet”. I had no idea who he was. I certainly had no idea that he was one of the Birch brothers of Bebo fame. I was looking through how people had listed me one day, spotted it and thought “why not?” and we arranged to meet up for a coffee. Twitter is a serendipity accelerator. If you use it in an open “yes, and” kind of way it can lead you to all sorts of unexpected places. Like starting a company a couple of years after a chance encounter like this.
Rakesh Kumar, the Content Head at SocialSamosa, replied to a tweet that changed his career:
It was December 2011 where I saw this blog named SocialSamosa.com start up; it was focussed towards covering the Indian social media industry. I was already deep in neck with my social media ambitions by then and I used to follow the blog closely.
In January 2012, Ankita Gaba, cofounder of Social Samosa was looking for people who can write on the portal. So she tweeted this out.
I thought it would be a nice way to get some word out for myself by writing on a blog that was fast catching up on popularity. And thus I began writing for Social Samosa. Soon afterwards, I was offered to join full time and today, I am one of the core team members. It’s been a long ride since then and the journey has been awesome to say the least.
I still can’t fathom where I would have been if not for THAT one tweet.
Given the subject matter, I’ll let the tweets do the talking:
The moral of this story is a simple one: put yourself out there and you just might be heard by the right people. Say nothing and that’s what you’ll get.