I have heard from various sourcing and recruiting professionals that they think that sourcing via Twitter, can be a waste of time. Quite the contrary it has some interesting search options.
Firstly, let’s look at some stats. According to Omnicoreagency.com via this link Twitter has:
- 330 Million Active Monthly users
- 500 Million Tweets sent per day
- 100 Million Daily Active users
That’s quite a tally of users there. Which means you may be able to find ways to engage your candidate pools.
One of my favorite techniques is a simple Hashtag search. A hashtag is simply a way to highlight a specific theme that can group particular tweets on a specific topic. Using this knowledge to our advantage, say you had a group of candidates who had attended a conference that you wanted to follow. Find the most common hashtag for that conference, and you are going to find a bunch of tweets from your target candidates and possibly might engage them in a dialogue. Responding to a Tweet, you may get a dialogue going.
Try it. Here’s one example. Say I wanted to find a Content Market Manager. What conference might they attend? The American Marketing Association is a good starting point. Visit their website:
I noticed the Events/Training link which lists their conferences. So I clicked on that link. Notice that they list upcoming conferences, using the dates to my advantage, I can track the #AMA hashtag, or #AmericanMarketingAssociation hashtag as their events get closer:
Going back to their conferences page, at the top there are a bunch of links with interesting information, one an annual conference is especially useful:
Clicking on the annual conference, I found this.
You can also see the keynote speakers from the conference:
I know it took place in August 2017. But it also gives me clues on who might follow them.
I can use this to my advantage while searching Twitter.
I conducted a simple Hashtag search to check common themes.
#AMA #Conference #Marketing – Look at the results:
I stumbled upon a nice clue provided by the San Francisco AMA for content marketers. Look at that list of Marketing Conferences. It lists the following:
- Content Jab
- Confab Higher Ed
- NY Ad Tech
- DC Podfest
- Programmatic Media
- Summit
- Ad Age Next
Let’s try the last one as a hashtag: #AdAgeNext – these are the results:
You find the Twitter handle for Ad Age Next, and if you look at those Tweeting you can see interest in multiple topics, and you can see some very enthusiastic comments about the event. Those content marketing candidates following this hashtag are likely brilliant professionals for a Marketing Content role. If you click on the Twitter handle, you will find the list of followers for AdAgeNext which would be great candidates to consider for a Content Marketing role. There are close to 1,000,000 followers.
By clicking the follower list, I have an excellent option for potential engaged candidates:
By getting creative, you can come up with a way to engage in a possible conversation. But that’s a post for another day. Regardless, you can see the type of creative digging you might have to do to find prospects and uncover great information via hashtags which lead to a treasure trove of useful information. Hashtags are one way to search for candidates that you might be interested in and can be a sourcer’s best friend on Twitter.