Twitter Job Search Tips
By Social-Hire
This is part 2 in the series 3 Tactics You Can Use Today To Build Relevant Social Media Connections. By following these insights you will quickly grow the number of highly targeted and engaged twitter accounts you are following to further your job search.
In part 1, you'll recall we addressed how to use a secret LinkedIn shortcut to connect with recruiters - even if you don't have a paid account. In part 2, we want to look at a specific approach you can use to quickly target relevant Twitter accounts to follow. This will involve finding Twitter lists of relevant contacts to follow - and then cleansing your twitter account of those users whose activity is not going to assist you in your job search.
Note: If this is your first time reading our twitter tips, you may also want to have a read of the articles "How To Tweet Your Way To A New Job" and "Your Essential Twitter Toolset". Both will help you to extract the maximum value from your twitter account.
Tactic 2 - Quickly Follow The Right Twitter Accounts To Further Your Job Search
The approaches we're recommending in these articles are specifically aimed at growing your social media connections for job search purposes, though actually they are relevant for anyone wanting to engage more effectively via social media.
One major challenge we hear candidates talk about is how to use their twitter account to engage effectively with recruiters and employers. Tips for doing this are covered in the job search articles I referenced above. Here and now we're going to focus purely on how to quickly grow the recruiter accounts you are following - whilst ensuring those you are following are relevant and engaged (and so can contribute to your job search endeavours).
What we have found to be an extremely effective approach is to identify Twitter lists that contain the types of recruiters / employers you would like to follow; and then, once followed, to use a twitter tool to cleanse your twitter account of anyone not engaging in a way that's going to be beneficial for your job search.
Following Twitter Accounts - Getting Started
To get you started, we would recommend using Listorious to research Twitter accounts to follow. You will see you can search for either individual Twitter accounts or for Twitter lists - so experiment with searches in your sector that include things like "recruiters", "hiring", "jobs" or "recruitment". You should quickly be able to find some relevant people to follow.
The next step is crucial though. For every person you see who looks like a relevant recruiter contact to follow, visit their twitter account profile page. Take a look at their lists, to see if they themselves manage lists of twitter accounts relevant to recruiting in that sector. You will find that many do. Alongside that, check to see the lists that that Twitter account is a member of. This is so powerful! Here you are using the power of crowdsourcing and the collective wisdom of the Twitter population to help you identify people who are worth following.
To get an idea of how this works, take a look at the link for Social-Hire's Founder Tony Restell. You will see that other Twitter users have determined that Tony is an authority on subjects like social media, job search and recruitment - and so have included him on their lists. Now imagine you've found the first recruiters whose twitter accounts you've decided to follow in your niche sector. Imagine your delight when you see that those recruiters feature on lists of other twitter accounts in the same field. Twitter lists can hold up to 500 twitter accounts. So this approach can very quickly see you following loads of twitter accounts highly relevant to your job search.
Cleansing Twitter Accounts From Your Following List
Finding relevant recruiters to follow is one half of the job search time battle.
The other potential time drain - and constraint on your effectiveness - is removing from your following list all those twitter accounts behaving in ways that are not going to be beneficial to your job search. Since you are effectively limited in the number of people you can follow, you don't want to be wasting follows on those who ultimately can't assist in your job search.
Yet the above approach is going to result in you following quite a few twitter accounts which are i) now dormant, ii) automated (eg. only pumping out job alerts), iii) used only very occasionally or iv) run by people who never interact with their followers or reciprocate by following back. You could easily see half the recruiters you choose to follow falling into one of these categories.
This is where "theTwitCleaner" is a great resource for deciding which Twitter accounts to stop following; and better still to take off your hands the chore of actually unfollowing them. Once you are following lots of accounts, log in to this site (it's free) and have it run an analysis on your following list. It will then suggest accounts you may want to consider unfollowing, grouped by the reason for unfollowing them (eg. haven't been active on their account anytime in the last month). You can quickly select all the twitter accounts you would like to stop following and theTwitCleaner will unfollow them for you over the course of the next hours.
Image credit: rachaelvoorhees
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