Twitter Tips - Following Relevant Accounts

By Tony Restell

If you're using Twitter to reach out to new people, chances are you've been following lots of accounts to try and gain some traction. "But what Twitter tips can you offer to follow the right accounts?" I hear you ask. In this article I'll be sharing a couple of approaches you can copy in a matter of seconds - and that I've no doubt will produce great results for you too...

The Problem?

Once you've decided you want more than just a token following on twitter, one frustration I find you quickly bump up against is identifying the right accounts to follow... and dealing with the fact that you've followed a ton of irrelevant accounts. You know, the ones who's bios look great but who turn out not to be that active on twitter. Or who's bio gave you reason to think they'd be interesting to follow, but in reality they tend not to share stuff that's really relevant.

So here are a couple of quick twitter tips for getting around this problem:

1. Put yourself in the shoes (or should that be feathers?!) of your ideal twitter mate!

I'm sure other people must do this, but I've never seen it written about elsewhere; and it works so well for me that I simply had to share the idea with you here... Have you tried finding an online article that would be exactly what you'd expect your target audience to be reading and sharing - and then searching for that weblink on Twitter?

So let's say you want to start following telesales people for argument's sake. If we reverse-engineer things, doesn't it make sense that the people most likely to be tweeting an article like "10 Tips To Be A Telesales Pro" would be people who are themselves in the telesales industry? If you want to follow people in Liverpool, then searching for people sharing links to the Liverpool Echo is likely to contain a high proportion of twitter users based in Liverpool. And so on and so forth. All you need to do is keep your eyes open and be alert to what content your ideal candidates would be most likely to be sharing.

This becomes even easier if you are a recruiter in a particular sector. Because part of your daily routine will undoubtedly involve you staying on top of developments in your industry. And through your social networks, people you're connected to are already sharing with you lots of articles relevant to people in your industry. So what if every time you read an online article that's relevant for your target audience, you searched on twitter to see who else had shared that article - or had tweeted other links from that same site (if it's a niche site). Hey presto, before you know it you have a ton of people to consider following, almost all of whom will have the type of demographic profile you're looking to target.

Want to know the added bonus of doing things this way? Because you're only pulling up accounts of people who have tweeted links in the last days, by definition you're going to be following people who are active on the twitter platform - not the zombie accounts that make up such a high proportion of the bio profile searches you may have undertaken previously. You're a winner twice over!

2. Who else in their flock is active?

As Twitter tips go, here's another great one for following relevant and active accounts. Maybe you've tried finding people who follow another user or who are followed by another user. So say you're a telecoms recruiter and you look at who follows other telecoms recruiters, you turn up some useful leads that way. But the problem is that you bump up against spam bots - accounts that have been set up to auto-follow users and / or that pump out nothing but promotional dross. You also end up following tons of accounts that have long since turned inactive.

So how to get around that one?

Well another approach I've found really productive is to instead search twitter for anyone tweeting that user's username. These are people who are either sending that twitter user a message, or are retweeting the content they have been tweeting. So the profiles of the results this produces are likely to be similar to the followers / following accounts of that user - but with far fewer spam bots and with the added advantage that you again know these accounts are active.

For those recruiters of you out there who're trying to make better use of Twitter for recruiting purposes, I really hope these Twitter tips have been a great help. What others can you add? Feel free to share via the comments section below.

If you're looking to get better results from social media, why not consider outsourcing as an alternative to hiring a social media manager? It's typically only 1/3 of the cost and very low risk. Do book in a call if you'd like to discuss further.

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