If you’re engaged with me on Twitter, you might have noticed I have two Twitter profiles: CarlSetzer and SetzerDigitial. This is for focus. I read years ago that you should keep a blog focused as narrowly as possible.
@CarlSetzer is my oldest Twitter profile, which I started in 2007. I rambled over different topics over time, but for the past several years @CarlSetzer has been focused on my poetry, and mainly my daily+ haiku and regular contribution to the @Baffled Haiku Challenge, and tied to my poetry blog. It is growing solidly and has a fair amount of engagement. When I experiment with posting non-poetry, the engagement is dramatically less, and I slowly start to lose followers.
@SetzerDigital has been around since 2017, started as a part of my brief foray into geek blogging (you can see the remnants on my Tumblr page and this Facebook page), but I’m not engaged with that project at this point. (quick aside: I thought I LOVED geek things and was an expert. As I launched into this space, though, I discovered I wasn’t as deep into things as I thought.) I opted a few weeks ago to repurpose this for something tied with my new career focus. I felt that a new account made more sense than trying to shift gears with my main account. A big thing: I still love writing poetry and engaging with that community. Since I have at least another year of study before I’m trying to look for work, I have plenty of time to build out that community. And that work seems to be solidly underway. In the past 30 days, I’ve gone from 51 to 73 followers, which may not seem huge, but it is a >40% increase. I’m happy enough with that. I do, of course, reserve the right to nuke this whole thing and integrate my two accounts.
Twitter is part of my growing marketing/branding plan. I know that my network will be key to landing my next role. I don’t think that dropping resumes on websites will be terribly effective, for me, at least. Twitter’s developer community is pretty awesome. Thus my community will be crucial in my work search. Having a group of people who know me, know my work, and understand this part of my passion.
What do you think? Oh, if you’re on Twitter, I’d love it if you’d pop on over, say “hi” and give me a follow.
