A good way to get your job advert seen is to advertise it on Twitter. The social network’s so big, that even TV adverts are using hashtags now; does the #BeMoreDog campaign ring any bells? So, here’s what you need to know advertising jobs on Twitter:

How it works

The amount of jargon surrounding it makes Twitter sounds a lot more daunting than it actually is. If you have a Twitter account, you will have access to the following:

A Twitter page:

This is your main page, and is the equivalent of a Facebook profile. All of your tweets will be listed on here. People will view this page to find out about you, your company and what you Tweet.

A Twitter newsfeed:

This is a stream of tweets that have come from other people. You’ve probably heard of the term ‘following’. If you follow somebody, their Tweets will show up in your newsfeed. If somebody follows you, your tweets will show up in their newsfeed.

Posting a tweet: Stick to the character count

Each tweet has to be 140 characters or fewer.

Any information over this character count will be automatically cut off the final tweet. If that information happens to be the link to the full job description, the Tweet was pointless, as nobody can respond to it anyway.

Of course, 140 characters isn’t much. It’s just enough space to convey:

• The job title
• The location 
• The salary
• Your company name
• A link to the full job description

The fewer characters you use, the better. This is because people might ‘retweet’ your status.

What is retweeting?

If people retweet you, your post will show up on their page, with an ‘RT tag’ added to it. For example:

If Tirebuck Recruitment tweeted:

New #job: Team Administrator, Kenilworth, £17k - £20kpa …[link to job]

Somebody would retweet:

RT @tirebuck : New #job: Team Administrator, Kenilworth, £17k - £20kpa …[link to job]

You’ll notice that in the retweet, the tweet started with ‘RT @tirebuck:’ This shows everyone on Twitter that it originated from you. It’s a way of avoiding plagiarism, and crediting you for your own contribution.

Getting retweets is a good thing. If somebody retweets your post, it means they find your information interesting, and are choosing to show it to people who are following them.

Write in note form

Forget everything you learned at school…on Twitter you don’t have to write in full sentences.

Don’t write: We’re looking for a part time assistant to work in London, for a salary of £40k

Do write: New Job – Part time assistant, London, 40K [link to job]

You’ll notice that the second example uses fewer characters and is easier to skim. This is important on Twitter; people’s newsfeeds are so inundated with tweets, that if they can’t get the point of yours at a glance, they won’t pay any attention to it.

Use hashtags

Hashtags make your tweets instantly searchable. Here are some examples of hashtags:

#BeMoreDog #JobSearch #DontGetScroogled

They’re basically labels to tell people what your tweet is about. If somebody searches for a term and you have it as a hashtag, your tweet is more likely to show up in their search results.

Here’s an example of a tweet that uses hashtags:

New #Job – Part time assistant, London, 40K [link to job] #JobSearch #employment #JobPost

A hashtag can go on the start, end, or even in the middle of a tweet. As long as it has a # in front of a word it’s fine. If you have multiple words as hash tags, don’t include any spaces.

Get followers

If somebody follows you on Twitter, they will see your Tweets. A good way to get followers is to run a quick search on Twitter for people discussing certain topics.

If you recruit a lot of web designers, for instance, search for people who tweet about web design, coding and the like.

If you find these people, follow them. They may follow you back. You should also follow people in a similar industry to you, and recruiters. They’ll be likely to retweeet your post, which means their followers will see it, too.

If you have a tweet direcly for a follower, you can ensure they get it by adding @theirname to the tweet.

Engage with recruiters on Twitter

It’s important that you engage with recruiters on Twitter.

If you advertise a vacancy, they may have just the person you need. Also, recruiters on Twitter are going to have hundreds of job seekers following them, simply because they post lots of jobs.

If you work with a recruitment agency (in Solihull for us!) offline, they will normally tweet about your vacancy themselves.

This article is from Tirebuck Recruitment, a Recruitment Company in Solihull.