Sirona Says

4 Tips you need to know about when using Twitter

 

Twitter is brilliant but at the same time it can be v-e-r-y frustrating! So much to learn and so many 'mistakes' to make, whether you are newbie or an old hand.
But to be fair, Twitter themselves don't make it any easier, with their 'rules' and constant evolution (they call it improvements!) of their platform. Heck, things can never stay the same in 'social land' for more than 5 minutes can they?
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight four of these things about Twitter that you may not be aware of, but are important to understand when using it. Here they are:

1. Twitter stops you from seeing some tweets. This happens when people are having a conversation on Twitter - using the @twittername at the start of the tweet. When a tweet begins with @twittername Twitter interperates this as a Reply. Only those following both you and the person you mention will see the tweet in their timeline. When you mention someone using their @twittername in the body of your tweet, everyone can see it. Thanks Katharine Robinson for that gem. 
2. You get more clicks on a link depending on where you place it in a tweet. This sounds strange when the message is only a maximum of 140 characters, doesn't it? Well some research by Dan Zarella has shown that putting the link 25% of the way through the tweet, gives you the best chance for a click on it! Only way to see if it true, is to test this yourself!
3. You won't see all your re-tweets in your timeline. This gets a lot of people confused and equally frustrated, as it doesn't allow them to see who has been sharing their tweets, and therefore not allowing them to engage with them directly.
   It is to do with the 'official' re-tweet link on Twitter.com and on the official Twitter apps. Once someone has re-tweeted your tweet having used the 'official' Twitter.com (or app), each time someone else re-tweets it, you won't see it. Twitter won't show it in in your timeline again. Fortunately if you use a third party Twitter application like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet etc (both desktop and mobile versions) you have the option of changing the style of re-tweet, therefore allowing everyone to see them in their timelines. 
4. Twitter controls who sees your tweets. No big surprise here is there? I mean Google and Bing do it every day. It is to do with Twitter Search - search.twitter.com - they have their own little algorithm that 'scores' your tweets and ranks them in the search results (that is if they are not overloaded with the billions of tweets they have in their data set!) So when you are searching on Twitter search, make sure you do multiple searches around the same search queries, to find what you are looking for (and don't forget searching relevant hashtags).

For all the above Twitter 'issues' there are work rounds, and as always with social media, people are happy to share them. If you do have 'strange' things happen on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc it is always worth asking people in social land -  someone will have the answer........somewhere! 

And of course if you are not following me on Twitter, why not start today :-)

Follow @andyheadworth

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The effect of Twitter on recruiters [cartoon]

 

Some Friday fun today. This was a cartoon from the awesome Geek and Poke that I 'tweaked' a little :-)

I am not sure if there is any truth in it though? 

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What does Twitter Reach, Relevance and Frequency actually mean?

I always get asked about what you are supposed to measure on Twitter, aside form the obvious things like Follower numbers, number of Twitter Lists you are on etc. For example why does Twitter reach, relevance and frequency really mean?

I came across a good post by FreshNetworks, who looked at this exact issue in their post.  They produced an easy to follow presentation explaining the four areas you should be looking at. I have put these four areas together in one image, so you can easily see the different measurements you can extract via Twitter and what they really mean, below.

Adapted from this excellent slideshare presentation by Freshnetworks

Any clearer now?

There are many tools that you can use to measure the areas mentioned above, some of which are in the Slideshare presentation (link above).

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5 Twitter search tools to help you avoid the Where's Wally syndrome

 

  
For many people using Twitter is a bit like plating the kids game 'Where's Wally?' - you what you want is in there somewhere, you just can't find it!
In the game (example above) there is a mass of people in an image and one Wally (left) to find amongst the crowd in the pictures. Can you find him above?
Twitter is the same - there are 60+ million tweets a day and 200+million people using it. How do you find things on Twitter that are useful to you? >> By the way - can you find the Twitter bird in the picture above?

It is all about using the right tools to find what you want - whether that is people, information or trends etc.

Here are five tools that I really like that will help you find what you are looking for on Twitter:

1. Monitter  - www.monitter.com.
   
    
   I have been using this for what seems like ages. In simple terms it is a real-time live Twitter search tool. You can have single or multiple columns, and you can also do a geo-location search i.e. tweets with X miles of a locations. And you can create widgets of your searches if you want. A very good simple - yet powerful - tool.
   
   
2. Twime Machine - www.twimemachine.com
   
   
   
   This is more a tool to use when researching someone on Twitter. It allows you to look at the last 3200 tweets from any Twitter account (after you have signed in that is). I find this much easier than the Twitter.com profile search, just because it is much quicker.
   
   
3. Topsy - http://.topsy.com
   
   
   
   Another of my favourites for search Twitter. You can change the search time line easily, take the RSS feed or email alerts from the searches, change the language and more. A superb search engine that is definitely worth putting in your browser favourites!
4. Twellow - www.twellow.com
   
   
   
   This is so easy to use for finding people. Think of it as the Yellow Pages for Twitter. It is that obvious - with people broken down by categories, sub-categories etc. If you haven't tried this site yet - have a go, it is superb!
   
   
5. Listorious - http://listorious.com
   
   
   
   Twitter lets you create Twitter lists. Listorious allows you to search these lists really easily. You can either search and find people (individuals) or lists of people - brilliant!

There are of course many other tools to use, and the most obvious ones like search.twitter.com and socialmention.com are two of the best for searching Twitter. But it is always worth trying these specialist little tools sometimes because they focus purely on Twitter and therefore produce (for me anyway) improved results.

It goes without saying - please let me know in the comments if you know any others that are worth exploring!

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Is the LinkedIn and Twitter relationship suffering from social media apathy?

 

Today I read a good post by Jacco Valkenburg regarding Twitter and LinkedIn. You can read the post, but to paraphrase, Jacco noticed that (percentage wise), less people were connecting their Twitter accounts to LinkedIn. He also intimates that some have even disconnected their accounts from LinkedIn.

This is a good point raised by Jacco, because I have found (after some LinkedIn digging) that a good few of my LinkedIn connections are actually on Twitter but have not connected their accounts together. [Just for reference, and according to the Tweets application in LinkedIn, just 25% of my 1400 LinkedIn connections have connected their accounts].

For me there are a number of answers:

1. People simply don't know how to connect their Twitter and LinkedIn account. And to be fair LinkedIn don't make it obvious do they? >> If you want to connect the two, login to LinkedIn , go to the more tab drop down box and click 'Get more applications' link. You will find Tweets in there. Click to add to you account.
2. Users have got p***ed off with the continual bombardment of other users twitter stream in their status updates. I covered this in a rant blog post about effective Twitter spamming on LinkedIn  (worth reading ). Because of this they choose to keep the two separate.
3. People still don't see the benefit of Twitter. For many Twitter is still an enigma, and I know from recent social recruiting training sessions I have done, that many people still don't fully understand the potential of Twitter.
4. LinkedIn users want to keep LinkedIn for business networking. This for me is one of the main reasons we don't see as many using Twitter on LinkedIn.
5. In the business world, there are not as many people actually on Twitter as we think. This is intrinsically linked to no.3 for me, as they don't get the business benefits yet. But that will change.

My final reason is apathy. While I like many others are pro-LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and alike for use as genuine social recruiting tools, I (unfortunately) think that many people just don't give a crap about it! They have a LinkedIn account because someone sent them an invite, they have a Twitter account because someone told them to join and they have a Facebook account because their mates told them they 'had to be on Facebook'.

No big issue.

We are all different and network in many different ways. Of course there are 100's of million people that use online networks to benefit their work. There are millions that don't.

I, for one, am of course a huge advocate for the use of online networks and social media in the recruiting world. But each to their own, and as you say....................." you can take a horse to the water, but you can't make them drink!"

Do you have any other reasons why you think that people are not connecting LinkedIn and Twitter together?

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Professional Tweeters......really? You better believe it!

 

Who would have guessed just a few months ago that a job title of "Professional Tweeter" would appear in the workplace?

For the anyone  who hasn't heard of Twitter, a pro-tweeter could be someone with a fetish for audio speakers or a something to do with our little feathered friends!
The reality is somewhat different! Pro-Tweeters are actually social media content specialists, using the social media platform, Twitter as their distribution medium........ oh yes, and they get paid for doing it!

Twitter is a platform with an absolute huge number of tweets on it every single day - anything between 50-100 million+ tweets a day, depending on global events! so making the messages (tweets) stand out is not easy!
Each event or conference will have a #hashtag assigned to it (hopefully only just one!!) to allow people to find and follow them easily. But that is the easy part. While there may well be a whole string of people that use Twitter attending the event or conference, making sense of the content, knowing what to share on Twitter to maximise reach and exposure is a whole different matter!

Well, for any of you that have followed social media conferences online over the last year, you may have started to notice a certain name appearing constantly on the tweets. It is that of the "pro-tweeter" Glenn Lesanto, using the Twitter name @lesanto.

As one of the few professional tweeters of the social media world, I was keen to understand his own definition of what he actually does, and what his take on what it is all about.
I caught up with him last week at the Social Media Week in London, where I was speaking on the Social Recruiting Panel and Glenn was the official 'Tweeter in residence' for the week.

So Glenn, what is a Pro-Tweeter?  " They are people that are being paid to tweet. Pro-tweeting is here to stay and it takes various forms. The skills needed are similar to those that might have been found in a magazine or advertising agency in pre-internet days. Attributes like brevity and impact were required in those disciplines for headline, strap line, caption and catch phrase writing - just as they are vital skills to effective tweet crafting.

There's the pro-live tweeter, a person who is paid to attend an event or conference and amplify it using twitter. If you think this looks easy I suggest you try it. To be good you have to be able to listen and tweet simultaneously. You must quickly and skilfully extract and abstract the best content from what could be a very fast moving presentation or activity. If the event is slow, you still have to keep a stream of pithy tweets going, so you're going to need to be creative. A good live tweeter is prolific and noisy but a great one brings reach. The live-tweeter's carefully tended and organically grown network provides a level of connection that is very hard to match.

Another type of live-tweeting involves crafting tweets for twitter accounts other than your own. Businesses, charities and even celebrities regularly use this service. Everyone can tweet but writing effective tweets professionally is not straight forward. Legal compliance, accuracy, decency, brand consistency, company voice and security are just a few of the things that must constantly be taken into careful consideration.

This covers just two types of examples tweeting, there are many more variants. Professional tweeting will continue to evolve into new roles as Twitter itself grows in strength and reach."

Glenn clearly lets his fingers and 'journo' brain do the talking - just take a look at some of the stats from Social Media Week in London last week (click on the image here on the left) - he made the No.1 influencer spot!

Glenn, is actually a direct (and proud) descendant from the pirates that roamed our seas many hundreds of years ago, and he uses this link on his website  - Pirate Talking. So if you see anyone walking around a conference near you soon with a parrot on his shoulder, then you know you have found Glenn!

Just for the record, if you think that this tweeting lark is easy, just check out some of his tweetstreams and then start to think again!

Just because he makes it look easy, doesn't mean it is!

 

The whole concept of professional content providers has been around for ever, and for me Twitter and other social media channels are the 21st century iteration.

So in future, if you have a live event or a conference, don't even think twice about hiring the likes of Glenn - they can make a real difference as to whether it will live or die in the social media channels.

 

 

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Social Recruiting Corner #2 [video] - social media footprint, Twitter and candidate applications

Today is the next in the weekly series of Social Recruiting Corner, where I answer your questions about anything to do with social recruiting.

The questions answered this week are:

1. What do you mean by social media footprint, and why is it so important in recruiting?
2. How do you find people to follow on Twitter?
3. Social media can help add many more candidate applications for a job, but after you have recruited the people for your job, what do you do with all the hundreds and hundreds of failed applicants - many of which are still very good?

So here are my answers this week:

 

If you have a problem viewing this then click here to watch on our YouTube Channel http://youtu.be/YezAkgS9HF0

And don't forget - if you have any questions you would like answered, then please send me an email, message me on Twitter, or just leave a comment here on the blog or on our Facebook Page.

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[Rant] Please read the link in the tweet BEFORE you click RT

 

Twitter rant time again! (Last time it was about Twitter and LinkedIn) > Think of it as my small attempt to change a few people's use of Twitter for the better!
If you don't use Twitter then this isn't relevant for you, but if you do please take note, NOW.

When you are reading the many tweets that come through your Tweetstream, there are some that you would like to retweet and share with your followers, right? These are the people that follow you because they believe you have interesting things to say.

So why then do so many people retweet other people's tweets without even reading the links that are on the individual tweet?  What a complete and utter waste of time!! If you haven't read the accompanying information (blog post, news link, picture, video etc) on the tweet, don't be twitter fool and retweet it just so you can lodge a retweet against your name. WHY? Very simple - the link you are retweeting might not be what you thought it was. Let me demonstrate with two recent examples - one a case of malicious keyword hijacking and the other a simple mistake.

This tweet potentially looked interesting for anyone interested in social recruiting:

However when you click on the link you get this

A blatant attempt to drive traffic to a blog about generating blog traffic (full of Google Adsense adverts)!!

This tweet was blindly retweeted by people last week (I am sure) because of the words 'social recruiting'. #DOH

The second example involves the massive twitter influencer @GuyKawasaki (330,000+ followers). He is an inspiration to many, and because of that he gets retweeted alot. However, this morning I came across some retweets of his original tweet and wanted to read more. So I clicked on the shortened link......... it didn't work!! (I am presuming the file shortening tool was having a bad day)


Look how many people retweeted it - and they must have done without even checking the link, because if they had then they would have realised it was broken!  #DOH
Note: It looks like as soon as @GuyKawasaki realised there was an error, he switched file shorteners and deleted the original tweets.

I think you have probably got the point I am making here. Don't clutter your follower's twitterstream up with retweets that you haven't even been bothered to read first just so you can fill your RT allocation for the day!

Show more respect to your Twitter followers than to waste their time. Remember Peter and the Wolf?

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Who uses Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? [Infographic]

If you believed the hype then every single person in the world is using social media! The reality is of course much different, but it is true that large nubers are, across a wide ranging demographic.

But who is actually using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? The guys at Flowtown produced (as always) an excellent social media demographic on a number of social media sites  (link at the botton of this post). I have taken the data out for the three main social sites involved in social recruiting (at the moment anyway) and grouped them together for easier reading.

It makes for some interesting reading. So, here are the demographics of who is using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?

The full graphic for the Flowtown Social Media Demographics can be found here.

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[Rant] Please stop filling up my LinkedIn Status Updates with your Tweets!

 

Let me get this straight. I love using LinkedIn and I love using Twitter. However, some aspects of the combination of the two is really starting to irritate me! <rant coming up>
Why?
Many people in my LinkedIn network (and lots of others I have no doubt) set up their LinkedIn account to post ALL their Twitter updates on their LinkedIn status updates - and when some people tweet 20-30 times a day that is a nightmare!!

I (personally) do not want to see my LinkedIn status updates fill up with 'tweets', I want to see the updates from my network. I have no need to see 20 jobs fed into my LinkedIn status updates from a recruiter I am connected with. It is simply noise, it is laziness (on behalf of the individual) and the only result will be is that I will hide all your status updates. So the next time you have something important you want to communicate to me, I won't see it!
The same applies to the serial Twitterers who tweet many, many times a day. >>> Please don't devalue the LinkedIn status updates with your (many irrelevant to your LinkedIn community) tweets. The answer is a simple one - just work a little harder to build your Twitter following up, rather than (potentially) alienating your trusted LinkedIn community.

You have probably spent a good amount of time developing your LinkedIn community, and it will likely have more professional depth than your Twitter following - after all it is full of all your professional contacts, work colleagues, business contact, future clients and future candidates. SO WHY DO YOU RISK P***ING THEM OFF by effectively spamming their status updates?

The solution is easy.

1. Respect your LinkedIn community and ONLY share 'tweets' that will ADD VALUE to your LinkedIn community.
2. Don't 'share' through more than two or three tweets from Twitter per day. Less is more!
3. If you have your account set up so that it sends through all your tweets change it now
     >> untick the 'Yes, share all tweets' button and click the one below.
   
4. In future, for any tweets you want to share on your LinkedIn status updates, just add #in at the end of your tweet. This will then appear in your status updates on LinkedIn.

I (like you I hope) am really interested in what my network on LinkedIn has to say every day, via the status updates. But if you keep on using LinkedIn as another Twitter distribution channel and don't care about what information lands in my status updates from you, then there is only one thing that will happen. I will remove you (hide you) from my status updates!

I really value my LinkedIn network and wouldn't dream of trying to abuse the trust I have built up over 6 years using it. I just wish others were more respectful!

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