How to advertise a job with Twitter

Twitter, with its many millions of users, is fast becoming one of the more popular social media recruitment options. In this article we show you a very simple way of using Twitter to advertise your jobs.

What is Twitter?

In the words of Twitter itself, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.”

In other words, Twitter is a social network that allows people to follow each others’ updates. When you post a tweet on Twitter, your Twitter followers will see your tweet and can comment on your Tweet, reply to you directly or “retweet” your tweet so that it appears as a tweet in their feed and is, therefore, shared with their followers.

Advertising a job with Twitter

Many companies are now using Twitter to advertise their jobs. While it’s free to do, there are a few things you’ll need to get started. First, you should have a Twitter account, access to a Twitter account, or a friend or colleague with a Twitter account. If you don’t have a Twitter account or access to one, you can sign up and create one yourself.

Second, whatever Twitter access you use, you should also have some followers. Clearly, there is little point in tweeting your job if no-one is following.

Third, you’ll need a job vacancy.

With these three things addressed, you are now ready to prepare your job tweet. Remembering that each tweet is limited to 140 characters it is imperative that you get the most important information into your job tweet. Typically, this important information is the job title, industry sector, location, salary and your company name. For example, if you were looking for a new Sales Manager your job tweet might be:

“mycompany is looking for a Sales Manager in Online Media in London £40K http://www.mycompany.com/job-details-URL”

We’ve got the most important information into the tweet and interested parties will know exactly what it is about. You’ll also notice that we have included a URL or web address in the tweet. Ideally, you’d want a web page where you can direct interested candidates to find out more about the job and, hopefully, apply. Twitter allows you to post web urls into your tweets. (note: if you have a very long URL, you can use a URL shortener like http://www.bit.ly)

However, even if you don’t have a web page to redirect candidates to, it is still possible to tweet your job and have interested candidates message you directly and then send them details:

“mycompany is looking for a Sales Manager in Online Media in London £40K. Direct message me for more info.”

Now you are ready to post your tweet. Simply log in to your Twitter account and go to the “What’s happening” box to post your job tweet.

Once your happy with your job tweet, simply click ‘update’ and your job tweet will now appear in your feed. All of your followers will be updated with the job tweet and know that you are hiring. If you yourself do not have access to the Twitter account or are asking a colleague to tweet the job for you, simply send them the tweet you prepared and ask them to tweet it for you.

Ideally you will want to push the job tweet to as many people as possible so be sure to get friends and colleagues to retweet your tweet if you can. Like all advertising, job tweeting is only effective if you get it to the right people so try to push your tweet as much as possible.

And that’s it. You first simple job tweet. Get tweeting.

Next steps? Check out these other guides and articles:

• An Introduction to LinkedIn for recruitment
• An Introduction to Social Media Recruitment
• Creating a Social Media Strategy for Recruitment
• How to advertise a job with Facebook