Social Media For Recruiters: How To Use Twitter To Build Your Own Desk
Despite the fact that Twitter is now such a big part of many people’s lives; both for work and pleasure, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that many recruiters are baffled by this the whole twitter thing! Not knowing how to get the most out of it.
As a rec 2rec company we talk to recruiters all the time and over half have no idea what they should be doing on Twitter. Social media for recruiters is a powerful means of reaching out to both clients and candidates and a great help in boosting brand awareness and driving traffic to your recruitment companies’ website and ultimately your desk.
Getting started on Twitter is simplicity itself. You create an account and can begin following other people and posting tweets immediately. However, you also want to make it as easy as possible for clients and candidates to find you and when they find you, to be impressed by your professionalism.
Twitter offers a lot of opportunities for branding and customisation, including a profile picture, a header image and space for a short biography and a link to your company’s website.
Make your bio as engaging as possible; these are looked at more often than you may realise and people may decide whether or not to follow you based on them. Putting a little effort into making your account look as attractive and professional as possible will increase the chances of quality candidates and clients taking an interest in what you have to say.
One of the key things that recruiters forget about Twitter is that it is about two way communication. They may follow hundreds of people and those people may follow back, but if everyone is simply tweeting self-serving ads for their jobs and no one is reading or responding to anyone else, everyone is simply wasting their time.
You have to behave in the same way that that you want your followers to, reading and responding to tweets as well as posting your own. It is useful to look at the accounts of people who use Twitter for purely social purposes. They post updates about themselves, but also, post items that they think will be of interest to the people they are connected to on Twitter. They also keep up with the posts of other people and engage with them by responding or marking posts as favourites.
While it may take time and persistence to build up interest in your new Twitter account, the results in terms of building contacts and boosting the profile of your company will be significant. Even if you seem to be attracting very little attention at first, continue to post interesting tweets, ideally on a daily basis. When you do attract potential clients and candidates, they will look at your account to see whether it is active or whether it appears to be gathering dust.
A great feature of Twitter than will make your life easier is the option to create lists. This can help you organise the people who follow you and whom you follow in ways that make it easier to keep up to date with important tweets and discussions. For example, you could create a list containing the accounts of potential candidates and one for clients. You can also create a list of industry news sources which you can read to keep abreast of the latest developments and perhaps even provide inspiration for some of your tweets.
Ready to take some action?
Till next time,
Cheryl Wing and the GSR2R Team