Followers | Jobs Blog

Twitter is a social network that lets the users communicate with messages of only up to 140 characters. SMS-ish like. When you register you can follow other people and what happens when you follow them – whatever they write is shown on your profile. You actually subscribe to their updates. Other people can follow you and that enables you to place your message on their Twitter profile page. Altogether twitter is a tool taht delivers short message from a user to a group of users who subscribe for this updates.

The description above actually describes a fantastic marketing tool. You can subscribe to whoever you like, and get their messages. Anyone else can subscribe to you. It is a massive permission based marketing model, dressed up as a social network.

Twitter can be used as a marketing channel to market anything. A business, a brand, a product, or a person. In fact it is used in personal branding right now in Ireland with candidates marketing themselves on Twitter just nine days before the Elections for the European parliament.

Here is how candidates from the Dublin constituency use Twitter to market themselves to the Irish voters.

Another interesting aspect , besides the number of followers and following, is the Activity. How many messages or broadcasts to their followers have each candidate made so far?

Name	Number of Tweets
Déirdre De Búrca	259
Eoin Ryan	144
Joe Higgins	160
Proinsias De Rossa	44
Eibhlin Byrne	30
Caroline Simons	n/a
Mary Lou Mc Donald	n/a
Patricia McKenna	n/a
Gabriel ´Gay´ Mitchell	n/a

The article Twitter and European Elections in Dublin South shows the number of followers and people following – or basically a ‘Broadcast Network’ of each candidate. You can clearly see that the number of messages published is in direct correlation with the number of people following you.

So how to use Twitter in the recruitment or looking for job? Simple! Just log in, create your account, look for interesting people, follow them, publish the messages you want to be found and followed for. The more messages you post to the larger and ‘more interesting’ network, the more effective will your Twitter marketing be.

Do not forget how are you presenting yourself as well. There is a full Profile you can fill on Twitter about yourself.

Make sure you do not put a face of a dog instead of your photo as the
Major of Dublin did, since people will be quite reluctant to follow a dog!?

Twitter is surprisingly good tool for the recruitment. You can track the conversations and when used in conjunction with LinkedIN or any other tool it shows the real time live activity of the person. As does Facebook. Monster or any other CV database will never tell you that. An application from a job site or your web site will never tell you what a person is really about. Twitter does. It also tells you what other people think the person is about. And that is unique in the recruitment industry.

Do not try to recruit by using Twitter alone. But you can use Twitter to find the conversation about topics. You can use the job skill as the topic, or even better a conference or something that has a time factor. You can find people that are talking about the certain themes – related to the job or a position you are trying to fill. Find who is talking about it, what do they talk about it and who do they talk about it to. There is your talent pool, with reference check, and a real time data about their recent activity.

Or you can put it all upside down. You talk about what you do. People who use Twitter well will know how to find you. Actually they will find what you have to offer, and that is your jobs. Talk, tweet, comment others, follow, you will get the lingo quickly. Find people that you know and respect, follow, monitor their followers. Just be active, as you would be on any networking event. Twitter is actually just one constant networking event. It is happening with or without you. It will not wait for you. You need to be in to meet the people you want to meet.

http://twitter.com/irishrecruiter