Twitter Jobs & Non-Twitter Jobs
Tweet, tweet for your paycheck: Context Collapse #142
So.
Roughly speaking, there are three types of jobs in this world.
Jobs where tweeting to your heart’s content under your real name while interacting with stangers is beneficial to your job1.
Jobs where a bit of tweeting is okay, but you better not spend hours a day on Twitter.
Jobs where posting to Twitter just isn’t a good thing.
Let’s dig in.
And let’s go a little further: People who work the first type of job don’t understand the other two kinds of people.
Let’s Play Twitterball
I work as a comms consultant now, doing mostly marketing and advertising work with a bit of PR advising on the side. In a past life (roughly from 2010-2017 or so), I was a journalist; first as a freelancer and then at Fast Company.
As a journalist, I was fully aware that Twitter and frequent Twitter engagement was a pathway to career advancement. I’ll go even further and say that Twitter plays a major part in the career prospects of most print and digital journalists alongside some television folks.
Posting on Twitter is where you do things like:
Network.
Build a personal audience (as opposed to your employer’s brand audience).
Score speaking gigs/radio/tv appearances.
Lay the all-important steps for book deals, promotions or other forms of career advancement.
A journalist who isn’t a regular Twitter user is at a significant disadvantage for career growth in 2022. Twitter is the office watering hole, the after-office bar, a global chat room and a gladiator colosseum all in one.
This has an obvious disadvantage for many journalists in that they can easily spend more time on Twitter than, err, doing their actual work.
It also opens the door for PR headaches for both journalists and employers because journalists are human and occasionally say stupid things, pick fights, go off-brand or generally act unpredictably as humans happen to do2.
The Social Media Professions
Roughly speaking, the most Twitter-friendly professions:
Journalists
Politicians
Academics
Authors
Scientists
CEOs/C-suite types
Actors
Musicians
Did I leave any out? Let me know.
When Twitter Doesn’t Work
But… what works for the journalist, the professor or the politician doesn’t necessarily work for everyone else.
Here’s the deal.
An academic looking to build up speaking appearances and gain juice in their specialist field has very real incentives to argue discourse on Twitter for two hours a day. A politician trying to get elected has very incentives to go the full troll on Twitter using their real name.
However… an auto mechanic, a departmental manager at a midsize SaaS company, the owner of a local restaurant or a supermarket deli employee doesn’t.
For all these folks, other social media venues make more sense for doing their self-expression thing. A savvy auto mechanic can build a monetizable audience with YouTube or a mailing list. The SaaS manager should be all over GitHub or Stack Overflow. The restaurant owner should be paying careful attention to Instagram. The supermarket deli employee can become a TikTok capicola influencer.
Very little good and many things bad come out of those people spending lots of time arguing or even just being themselves on Twitter on an account clearly linked to their IRL identity. After all, sockpuppet and alias accounts exist for very good reasons.
Bridging The Gap
When I transitioned from journalism to advertising, and then on to consulting, I found something out: Twitter was a headache.
Reasons:
Spending too much time on Twitter isn’t a good look when clients have work due.
Your opinions are a piss in the ocean compared to others.
Sometimes your customers don’t need to know your opinion on every little thing!
Being very blunt, my consulting business gets far more ROI from LinkedIn and this email newsletter than Twitter.
With that said… there’s something to be said for corporate leaders and key figures in organizations making their opinions known. If the leadership of a company are eager donors to a politician whose agenda you oppose, or if an organization eagerly supports stances you disagree with, that’s useful information for how to spend your money.
But nonstop tweeting of opinions on Twitter, for most people outside of the cultural producer-journalist-academic-politician vortex is generally just a bad idea.
And, going further, people who work jobs that require extensive Twitter use and people who work Twitter-unfriendly jobs don’t really understand each other’s online use. I don’t think they can, either—The idea of jobs where advancement is via strategic social media trolling and complaining doesn’t necessarily make sense. But they do exist and they’ll keep on existing no matter what the heck happens with Twitter from here.
For the purposes of this article, we’re talking strictly about tweeting under your real name or under an alias where there’s no plausible deniability about your identity. There are an entirely host of either very smart or very stupid reasons to create an anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account but those are out of the scope of this essay. Sorry!
I keep remembering how, years ago, I wrote an article about pet influencers. One of the things that stuck in my mind was how I asked one of my interview subjects, who represented dogs and cats in commercial endorsements, if it was hard scoring sponsorship deals for animals. She responded as quickly as I asked her that it was easy because animals are predictable, don’t act up and don’t go off-brand. She also seemed like she was waiting to give that talking point; I’m also pretty sure she was right.