If not you should be.
Why? well first of all social media is free advertising. Who doesn’t want that? Secondly, its a way to engage your users and let them FOLLOW YOU.
Thirdly its a way to promote your listings on social media and drive traffic to them. Not a ton of traffic but enough to make it worthwhile.
Fourth its also good for SEO. By having accounts on Facebook, Twitter, G+ you can show up in more search results. For anyone following you its kike subscribing to an RSS feed.
So how do you set up your twitter account to take advantage of these benefits? Here’s how;
1. Take your XML or RSS job feed and set up an account with Twitterfeed.com. It will auto feed all your listings. Be sure to add hashtags like #jobs and whatever other keywords important to your niche.
2. Your twitter account should have a branded background image. Check out mine for allcountyjobs. Think of it as a splash page.
3. Stuff your twitter profile with keywords and of course link back to your website.
4. Add “Follow Us on Twitter” links to the header or footer of your job bboard. Make it easy for people to follow you.
5. Finally and this is most important. Dont just feed your jobs and ignore the account. Retweet other users and put a human behind the twitter account. You dont need to spend hours on it, just a few minutes morning-noon and night will suffice. Retweet job hunting articles and become an advocate for both employers and job hunters.
Do these things and your twitter followers will increase over time. Plus if you ever want to sell your site having an active twitter account will make it more valuable.
BONUS TIP: Create an account for just jobs like @talentzoojobs does. This way you can seperate out the jobs for those only wishing to get that content. That will free you up to use your main twitter account for engaging with your fans.
Here are some of my other twitter job board accounts if you want to follow them.
https://twitter.com/#!/jobspeek
Hi Chris,
Great post. I would like to add something that, as a job seeker, is very frustrating with job board twitter accounts: expired jobs. I have clicked on many links in twitter only to find that the job was posted over a year ago! I live in DC where there are many job board postings but I think that to simply twitter a job for twitter sake (so to speak) is making the job boards look careless and not trustworthy. I don’t want to go to any job board from twitter and see that the job is expired or nonexistent.
Hi Chris,
thanks a lot for the post!
To post the feeds I use the service dlvr.it and I recommend it as it’s really flexible and reliable.
Excellent article and great tips Chris. I think we are using all your recommendations. One slight variation is that we have field specific twitter accounts with our branding. As an example we have @SalesJobMN. This saves job seekers a lot of time wading through all our job postings looking for ones that are in their field.
Good point Linda. As a job board, we are quick to get the jobs listed but pretty bad on pulling off expired jobs. Unfortunately, our employer clients post jobs for many different time durations – from a week to sometimes over a year. We need to work on that issue.
-Sam