Today I’m going to be showing you why I think Twitter is one of the best pre-qualifying tools ever. Whether you’re in HR, recruitment, sales, marketing, business development or a business owner, it’s more important that you recruit and build relationships with people that fit with your culture and your beliefs. I’m going to show you how, with a few easy steps, you can gain valuable insights from twitter that will help you make better decisions.

 


Audio Transcription:

Hello! It’s SocialMediaSean and today I’m going to be showing you why I think Twitter is one of the best pre-qualifying tools ever. Whether you’re in HR, recruitment, sales, marketing, business development or a business owner, it’s more important that you recruit and build relationships with people that fit with your culture and your beliefs. I’m going to show you how, with a few easy steps, you can gain valuable insights from twitter that will help you make better decisions.

For today’s example I’m going to be using the twitter account: TweetSmarter. This is a great account and a great example of what you could be looking for when you’re doing your qualifying. The first thing I want to do is take a look just briefly at their bio. What are they choosing to say to the world and why does it appear they’re on twitter. The next thing is I want to check out their links. I’m going to quickly do that. A lot of the time it is to their website, personal or corporate. When I get to their website, blogging is where I want to go. I want to look at if they’re writing influential articles in their field, are they posting regularly, is the content relevant, how does the site look…etc. Those are the two ways to get started.

Next, I want to take a quick look at their followers compared to their following. Now this is to be taken lightly as you can actually buy followers on twitter and mass follow people… things like that. What I like to see is that people ideally have more followers than they are following. That can show credibility when you see that. A lot of people are interested in them, not only because they are following them back, but they have good content.

After that we want to take a look at their tweets. Just to go through and see the kind of things they are talking about. See if they have the energy and/or professionalism you’re looking for. Also take a look to see if they are actually talking to people and not just tweeting out. This shows they have the ability to have a conversation and can give you a feel of what they’re talking about. You can see the conversations by the tweets starting with the @ symbols.

Another great tip/trick is to see what people are saying about them! So I can easily just do a twitter search here at the top. Once I get to their twitter handle I’m going to click ‘All’ and what this is going to show me is if people are actually sharing their content. We can see that a lot of people talk to them, they are retweeting them, which shows that they have credibility. They have an audience on Social Media. The neat thing about these guys in particular is that even though they are such a big account, they really have a lot of 2-way conversation. That is really ideal for any field, no matter what type of person you’re looking at hiring, recruiting or doing business with.

From there, the next thing I can look at is there social capital and influence. There are quite a few tools, things such as Klout, Kred and PeerIndex. These measure the person or organizations influence on social media. In this case, I have a Klout plug-in that I got the extension for, for Chrome. I can quickly and easily see their Klout Score. Once on the Klout website, I can take a quick breeze through and see the other social networks they’re on, see what they’re influential about…etc. This is not perfect, but it is definitely something to take a look at. In this case they fit perfectly. This is a good example for if you’re recruiting someone for a technology job, and you see that topic here – that’s great! If you were to see knitting and soccer here it may not be a big deal, but it definitely gives you some great insight into the person or business.

After all of that, the last thing to do is to start a conversation! So we can go ahead and tweet them and see what type of person they are! To get to know them a bit better as a person, company or organization! I hope that was helpful for you. If you have any questions or comments, leave them at the end. Thanks for stopping by. Bye for now!

Links:  Klout Extension for Chrome