Twitter has become a great tool for both job hunters and companies looking for candidates. Whichever camp you’re in, Twitter allows you to directly interact with your target audience and build new networks, in real time. But the success you get from using Twitter can be directly correlated to how you use it, especially when it comes to the tools you use. With hundreds of followers to watch, Twitter trends to track, hashtags to follow, and a frequent need for continuously updating search results, getting by on the limited feature set available on Twitter.com is difficult at best. Enter the Twitter client.
What’s a Twitter client?
Twitter clients are third-party tools for using Twitter – and unlike Twitter itself, they can have several features that make it simple to organise the huge amount of information you can every day get from Twitter. They allow you to track keywords, hashtags, users, lists and more.
Twitter clients can be web-based, installed on your computer, or running on your mobile phone. Our favourite clients are Hootsuite and Tweetdeck – they’re free, very easy to use and make constant tweaks to how they work based on user feedback. They’re also both available on the web and as Iphone apps. Tweetdeck is also available to download to your computer.
A preview of what your Tweetdeck may look like
Why you should use a Twitter client to look for candidates.
Both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck allow you to track statistics on your tweets, by telling you how many people clicked on a link, replied to or retweeted your tweets. This can teach you a lot about the sort of tweets that your followers like, and the ones they don’t. Then you can adjust accordingly to provide the types of content your followers want, which leads to better interaction, more leads and more suitable candidates.
It makes sense that you would want to tweet when you know your followers are online, right? Well sometimes this is when you’re in a meeting, have left work for the day or other times you’re not sitting at your desk eagerly awaiting responses from followers and potential candidates. Some Twitter clients (yup, including Tweetdeck and Hootsuite) allow you to schedule tweets, something you can’t do from the Twitter website.
Overwhelming your followers social streams to the point of annoyance should be a concern for any company. This approach of honing in on how to better target your audience without, frankly, spamming them is a great way to make sure you’re on their radar for the right reasons. Frustrating your followers with too many updates will mean they will unfollow you and probably won’t be that keen to work for you either.
This approach takes two steps: First, find out exactly when the best times for you to tweet are, by using a website that can track your audience. Mashable offers a few options here with “Five tools to better time your tweets”
Next, schedule tweets for those times about job vacancies, cool things your company is doing and all the other things you’ve just found out your followers like, that will attract candidates to your company. Be aware though, that scheduling is about putting content out at the best times, not just about when you’re not available. So it’s important that even if you’re not available right then you, or someone in your team, should respond to any replies in a timely manner – say a couple of hours or if it’s late at night, first thing in morning.
While this post is primarily about using Twitter, you can actually manage other social media accounts from a Twitter client. Both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite let you add your company Facebook account and manage posts and replies from the interface. Hootsuite also lets you add your LinkedIn, WordPress and Google+ accounts.
Why you should use a Twitter client to find a job.
Most job hunters using Twitter for job-finding-purposes are doing so from their personal accounts. This can make it tricky to keep track of all your potential networking contacts, what jobs are being tweeted about and what’s happening in your industry.
Twitter clients allow you to add columns to your view that can track all the tweets from lists of people you’re following – like contacts, potential employers, industry peers – as well as keywords and job-search-related hashtags (like, say, the #NZJobs hashtag).
This means you can just follow these columns when you’re wanting to concentrate on job seeking. You can add columns for lists of personal things too and both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck let you drag and drop new people into any list, making it really easy to manage your lists, and columns, from one place.
Preview of Hootsuite and how it can be arranged
Like the point we made above for companies, you can control your Facebook activity from either of our recommended Twitter clients. Because you’re able to separate the job-finding elements of Facebook too, you can use the client at times as an exclusive ‘social job seeking portal’, saving you time and sanity during your job search.
Do you currently use a Twitter client? Will you use one to help your job or candidate search now? Let us know in the comments!
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