If you begin following people in your industry and you'd like to follow them back, make thoughtful replies to their tweets by putting the "@" sign in front of their Twitter user name. Just like on Google, we all tend to look when our name gets mentioned.
"Many job seekers get jobs who have a thousand or more Twitter followers that they've built relationships with over time by supplying them with valuable content and insights," Schwabel says.
2. Choose Content of Your Tweets Wisely
If you're interested in getting noticed by people in your field, you must choose the content of your tweets very carefully, experts say. That means be specific and avoid the trivial at all costs.
"Talking about your lunch won't attract people who want to hire you," says Jeremiah Owyang ( @jowyang), a senior Forrester analyst who researches social technologies and writes a blog on Web Strategy. "Talk about the project you're working on. If you've been laid off, talk about the project you'd like to be working on."
You should share links to content you read on blogs and media sites that are relevant to your field, too, says Phil Rosenberg ( @philreCareered), president of reCareered, a career consultancy. In addition, link to other places on the Web where you've engaged with content, whether it be a blog post of your own, a comment you made to an article, or content on your LinkedIn profile.
"You can use Twitter as a megaphone to other places," Rosenberg says. "As long as you keep it around a central branding theme, you can help people get an idea of the types of things that interest you professionally."
As for the don'ts? Well, it might seem obvious (and the Twitter horror stories have been pretty well-documented at this point), but avoid bad mouthing previous (or current) employers, and watch for the tweets that, while perhaps honest, offer too much information.
"If you're looking for a job, don't tweet something you wouldn't want your mother to read," Rosenberg says. "If you're younger, don't talk about going out partying tonight or how you were partying so hard that you can't imagine getting through work. That's obviously not something a future employer would want to read."
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