It’s well known that career moves at the C-suite level are often made by virtue of personal recommendations and connections. There’s a profound sense that promoting oneself on social media is more something done by people less senior. Research from the University of Texas at Austin suggests this mindset might be misguided, and that social media can play a bigger role than we think.

The study found that executives who engage in frequent, yet modest, sharing of knowledge and expertise on Twitter were around 32% more likely to get well-paid job offers after they were interviewed. The finding is interesting, as using social media, such as Twitter, can often be viewed in terms of the risks involved if people post the wrong thing or their posts suffer a backlash. Indeed, executives might even be perceived by the public as self-promoting.

Suffice to say, this shouldn’t be viewed as an open goal, and it’s important that executives use Twitter in the right way, but if they do then the study suggests that it has more tangible and long-term effects on one’s job prospects and overall earnings.

“People who are actively self-promoting on Twitter will benefit from doing that,” the researchers explain. “They’re getting returns for their time.”

Tweeting on up

The researchers explored both compensation data for various C-suite executives alongside the posts those executives made on their personal Twitter accounts. Twitter was chosen because it allows users to broadcast to a much wider audience than Facebook.

The number of posts was measured for each executive, alongside the overall size of their audience. They also counted the proportion of tweets that were personal branding by analyzing the content of each tweet for any matches with the company and job position for each executive.

They also paired up executives who were looking for similar jobs so that they had one who had actively used social media for self-promotion with another who had not.

The findings seem to clearly suggest that being active on Twitter helped the career of the executives, as those who used the site for personal branding were more likely to be offered jobs at higher salaries than their peers who were not active on the site.

“Self-promotion worked in this class of people,” the researchers conclude. “We found that the idea of self-promotion is indeed a valid concept, and that it’s worth some time and effort to promote yourself on Twitter.”