Tweeting to Passive Candidates

Recruiters are already highly aware of the benefits of social recruiting and leveraging tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to help draw in candidates. And with so many outlets available to use, it is especially difficult to maximize their usefulness. Twitter is an especially important tool because it puts information into people’s hands quickly and succinctly. So with only 140 characters of real estate, it is crucial to know what readers, followers, and fellow tweeters want in their bite-sized information. In his Advice and How-To column at ere.net, Raghav Singh recently gave some pointers for using Twitter effectively as a recruiting tool based on research done by Carnegie Mellon and MIT.

The research showed overwhelmingly that Twitter followers respond to existing content rather than status updates. For recruiters, this means that they’ll likely find more traffic on their tweets if they retweet an article or send out informational data such as research or findings rather than simply tweet about job openings or make other daily status updates.

And how should you hashtag your great content, if at all? Singh recommends that tweeters be unique and use hashtags with caution. Hashtags are an excellent way to create micro-communities and stay connected within a single conversation. However, when they’re overused, they take up valuable real estate in an already limited venue. You want your followers to be able to follow and engage in a conversation easily, so create specific hashtags that are also easy to find. Also, use hashtags sparingly, not only to keep the conversation simple but in order to maximize the content you can stuff into a 140 character tweet.

And how should recruiters be tackling the problem of finding and keeping the community of followers that they want? It is impossible to tweet content that will be useful and interesting to everyone you are reaching with your tweets. But for this reason, try to focus your followers around certain categories and tweet to those interests. There are a number of tools available to help you find followers and to make your handle more discoverable. Singh covers a number of them.

One way to focus your content in a manner that will attract followers is to consider the demographic that you’re reaching with your tweets. Research shows that 15% of adults online use Twitter, but the majority of those individuals are between the ages of 18 and 29. So, seek content which speaks to the generation or your audience. Also, send tweets steadily. Your audience will respond more to a heavy stream of tweets and you’ll be easier to remember and find if they need to seek out your handle or something you previously tweeted in the future.

When considering the benefits of social media, perspective is always necessary as well. Companies could go overboard very quickly when trying to keep us with the pace of social media and it can be useful as well as time sucking. Experiment until you find what works for you, and then stick with it.

How do you use social media effectively? What are some suggestions for maximizing a tweet? Let us know in the comments!