A Two-Pronged Approach to Keeping Your Followers Engaged

This is the second part of a two-part blog series on how to reach more relevant candidates with your job posts and dramatically increase their response levels. One of the best ways to keep your candidates engaged is to fill your social media streams with less promotional posts and more helpful insights. The key to doing this is twofold. Firstly, you need to build up an archive of “evergreen” material that will be helpful to job seekers and professionals in your sector. I recommend a simple spreadsheet of tweet messages to share, whose content you know will be valuable to candidates for years to come.

Include in this spreadsheet:

• Tips in tweet format that will help candidates in their job search, job interviews, salary negotiations and when starting out in a new job. Take yourself somewhere quiet for an hour and you’ll find you can rattle off valuable insights for candidates at a right old pace! These tips don’t include any links, they’re simply sharing ideas for something candidates should do or focus on to further their career or their job search.
• Answers to FAQs in tweet format. Without doubt there are loads of questions candidates have about your company (or your sector if you work for a recruitment agency) that you are well positioned to answer. So help candidates by noting them down and sharing them!
• Links to articles about your company (or your sector if you work for a recruitment agency) that have appeared on third-party websites. Even though these are ultimately selling a candidate on the merits of your company, it somehow comes across like far less of a sales pitch if you send candidates to read an article on a news or careers website than if you send them to your own corporate careers page or jobs board.
• Links to great articles that help job seekers progress their job search (as a starting point, feel free to check the Career & Interview advice section on Social-Hire where you will find loads of evergreen articles!). You’ll quickly add to this list over time, so to get started you just need to pick out some good material from a couple of careers websites you like, or that are particularly relevant to your sector.

This spreadsheet provides you with material you can regularly retweet – and provides an archive of links you can use on LinkedIn and Google+ whenever you find yourself short of new material. Don’t worry about having tweeted the same thing over and over again. I promise most people will only see a fraction of what you tweet and so will find it beneficial that you repeat your tweets many times over. Even those who do notice a repeat tweet you will find actually retweet it for you rather than complain about the repetition. So do put that concern to bed.

Finding New Content

There are various ways of ensuring you have a new stream of relevant content to share. The key is to invest a bit of time up front (1-2 hours) so that thereafter your daily task of finding new content to share is literally something that takes just a couple of minutes.

The two methods I suggest (choose one or the other) would be to use RSS feeds or to use a Twitter search string.

To use RSS feeds, you’ll need to have an RSS reader. Personally I use Google Reader. It’s free and very easy to use. Put simply, as you visit websites that have content that you think is worthy of sharing, subscribe to their RSS feed with Google Reader. Set this Google Reader page as a homepage link and then every day when you open your browser, Google Reader will present you with details of all the new articles that have been published by the sites you think are worthy of sharing with your followers. It’s a simple job each day to pick out which ones you’d like to share as all the contenders are there for you in one place to choose from!

Personally, I prefer to use a Twitter search string to achieve the same goal. The two reasons for this are i) not every site has an RSS feed, so a Twitter search will produce more comprehensive results and ii) one great way of engaging with more people is to retweet their tweets. So rather than simply tweeting content you’ve found in your RSS reader, why not send out the exact same content but by retweeting the tweets of others. Over time you will see this build up considerable gratitude and also see it being reciprocated in turn – further increasing your reach.

To go down the Twitter search route, simply make a list of the site URLs that produce content you think is worthy of sharing. Then go to Twitter and in the search field list out all these URLs with OR inserted between each of them. You’ll then find your screen filled with new content from all your favorite content authors, but in a form that also readily allows you to share by retweeting. Now simply bookmark the page with these search results showing – and every time you return to that bookmarked page you’ll see the latest tweets of content from those sites (tip: select to see “All” tweets not just “Top” to get maximum results).

Of course some of the content you find this way you’ll also think is “evergreen” material, so over the following weeks your file of repeatable material will grow and grow. Soon you’ll have a repository that means you’re sharing content that your followers love and that has them increasingly hooked on your stream. That’s the end goal you want to achieve. If you get there, then the promotional messages you do send will be far more powerful – more likely to be read and more likely to be shared.

The Final Part Of The Puzzle

The only thing you now need to do is to spread your messages out over the course of the day. Do be sure to take advantage of Bullhorn Reach’s Engage feature to share content with your audience. I’ve also used HootSuite and Buffer to schedule my messages throughout the day.

I’d be delighted to hear of your successes in implementing this approach. Do feel free to reach out to me and let me know of your successes via Twitter … Tony

About the Author:

Tony Restell is the Founder of Social-Hire.com and a respected commentator in the online recruitment and social media sectors. A published author and Cambridge graduate, Tony spent his early career in strategy consulting before going on to build and sell a job board business. He is focused on helping candidates and recruiters use social media to find their next career or their next hire.

To view Tony’s blog, click here. Follow Bullhorn, Bullhorn Reach & Tony Restell on Twitter.