Okay listen, we’re not saying that you aren’t awesome. We think you are, and not just because you’re reading our blog post! What we’re actually saying is that there are strategies that you can put into place to help grow your online presence, make more connections with possible candidates and recruiters, and manage your Twitter life so that you can gain value on this channel while also having a social life away from the screen.
Are we ready to begin?
1. Use a Follower Tool
The social media purists and tree huggers out there have already begun shaking their heads, but a twitter follower tool is a fantastic resource for recruiters. A powerful follower tool will allow you to plug in keywords, locations, and more to track, follow, and engage with your target market.
Let’s pretend that you’re a recruiter at a software company in San Francisco, obviously not an unrealistic assumption. With a follower tool, you can plug in the zip code of your office and surrounding areas, and then toss in keywords to track like “java”, “software engineer”, and more. What happens next is magic! You’ll find tweets from people who live in those locations and are tweeting with those keywords and/or have those keywords in their Twitter bio. You can manually follow people or as some tools allow, automatically follow all that match up.
Using a strategy like this can help you gain an awesome number of followers who are your direct target market.
2. Tweet Useful Tips, Industry Information, and Engaging Questions
If people want to be sold to, they’ll drive up and down the highway staring at billboards. Think of social media as a party. The guy or gal who constantly talks about their business/job/work constantly is ignored and you normally wish they didn’t eat so much of your onion dip.
When you tweet, think to yourself, “would I want to read this?” Is the information beneficial to a mass amount of people? That’s what you need to determine before tweeting. We know that sending out a link to your job post is important, but every tweet shouldn’t be linked to a job description.
Break your tweeting strategy down into three categories:
- Useful Tips: These are best as career and job search tips for your candidates. They’ll love it and they’ll RT you big time.
- Industry Information: Tweet out links to articles covering the latest in your industry or share links to popular bloggers. Not only will your candidates be informed, but the big bloggers will respect you and share your name when they come across candidates in your niche.
- Engaging Questions: Tweet out general questions that are specific to your industry. That’s basically step one, step two is making sure you tweet back each person, thanking them for their response and asking a follow-up question to continue the conversation.
3. Utilize a Tweet Scheduling Tool
Now that you know how to gain targeted candidates as followers and how to tweet to those candidates, now we need to make your Twitter life easier. While you should absolutely be tweeting live fairly often, a scheduling tool will save your life when things get busy and make Twitter easier to come back to on a daily basis.
We have a few simple steps for you to follow that will make everything so darn simple!
Step 1: Set a day on your calendar (monthly or weekly) to brainstorm interesting content, engaging questions, and useful tips. If you do this monthly, try for 30 tweets, or 5-10 if this is a weekly ordeal.
Step 2: Assuming you’ve already set yourself up on a sweet scheduler/social dashboard like HootSuite or TweetDeck (both free), you’re ready to start plugging your tweets into the tool. Try for at least one scheduled tweet per day, while also using different times so that the account doesn’t look entirely automated.
HootSuite is a favorite of ours for managing Twitter and other social channels
Step 3: Once your traps (tweets) are set, now all you need to do is pop in a few times a day to see who has responded to your tweets or RT’d them out to their network. Make sure to respond to people quickly and thank them for their RT’s. This goes a very long way.
Step 4: Review what worked/didn’t work and then repeat the cycle.
For the recruiters who are just getting started in social media, you’re welcome. For those that have been around the block a few times, what other strategies and tools would you suggest?
