How Being a Career Content Creator on Twitter Changed My Life

It was 2019 and I was scrolling through LinkedIn when I realised that content that is career-driven is very popular and is much needed, especially in Malaysia. I was consuming career content religiously by Eric Siew, Syaza Nazura, Hanie Razaif-Bohlender, and the well-known Ishak Karim, just to name a few.

And I thought to myself, hey, I am passionate about design & I have some cool things to share too. So I started writing a lot on LinkedIn. Some of my posts got traction, some didn’t. I was still experimenting on what kind of intro will grab attention, how long should the paragraph be, and what sort of theme that people would read and share.

One year in, and I still didn’t get enough engagement. I was questioning myself — am I not good at writing? Is my content boring? Is there a secret to this?

Feeling disappointed, I stopped writing on LinkedIn.

Noticing the gap.

Fast forward to the middle of 2022, I was trying to get more freelance projects. And my first thought was to position myself on Twitter as the expert in creative design. I renamed my profile as Edd UI/UX Designer, so that if people are looking for a designer, they would find my profile on top of the Twitter search result. In order to prove my expertise, I wrote a few threads about career in UIUX. With only 500 followers, nobody actually retweeted my threads. T_T

Working as a remote designer, I noticed that nobody really talked about remote working. So I wrote a thread about searching for international remote jobs. And.. BOOM!

Click image to go to the tweet

The thread got over 7,800 retweets, 14,000 likes, and 3,000,000 views. For a newbie like me, those numbers were so huge that it motivated me to create more similar content. Why does this writing got so many engagements?

1. Attention grabber headline. I called out working people who work in the digital field.

2. Mentioning the relatable problem commonly faced by many people “Cheapskate local companies”.

3. Mentioning the benefits “Amazing salary”.

4. The solution “How to find international remote jobs”.

And people love this kind of content. They send me DMs saying that my threads are life-changing, that they’re able to change their career paths because of my writing. Some of them successfully find remote opportunities and are now working from random places. So I wrote more and more that I actually forgot my main reason of creating content: To find more freelance work.

Right place, right time, right skills.

To this day, I have built around 14.3k followers who read & engage with my content. The reason why my career content resonates with many isn’t a random outcome. It’s the years of deep desire to help people, to watch them fly high and become successful at what they do. It’s to serve a need.

In his book, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks, Assegid Habtewold mentioned that “One of the signs that may tell you that you’re in the right place? What you are doing now for a fee that you would have done it for free”.

So many of us are waiting for the right time to pursue something. You like someone? Oh no this isn’t the right time to confess. You want to change your career? Nope it’s too risky to find a new job now. You want to travel? Wait until I have more money. We keep telling ourselves one day I will…, when the reality is that you don’t have to be good to start, but you have to start to be good.

I have a friend who was an Engineer for 6 years. In those 6 years, his salary only increased from RM2,000 to RM4,000. Imagine working in engineering for half a decade and receiving only RM2,000 increment. When he decided to just f*ck it, quit and joined the graphic design industry, he made nearly RM6,000 within 3 years of working as a Graphic Designer.

I started writing on LinkedIn, but sometimes it takes a wrong turn to get you to the right place. The failure on LinkedIn taught me what I am actually good at, which is a combination of career and mental health. If I didn’t let myself fail and cling onto the hope that one day LinkedIn algorithm will favour me, then I wouldn’t learn, I wouldn’t grow.

The truth is, I never thought that making content can provide me with so many opportunities. Apart from getting more freelance jobs, I was also invited to talk to university students about UIUX, join a Tedx Talk to talk about the power of healing, appeared in a podcast, and hosted a mental health event.

I have discovered that the true essence of being a content creator lies in my ability to make a positive difference in the lives of others.

It’s the realization that every piece of my writing holds the potential to uplift someone, creating a sense of fulfilment that goes beyond views or likes.