Tweet Your Way Through Your Organization

In the last couple of years Twitter has become a very valuable tool for individuals and organizations all around the world. This social media platform permits you to exchange timely bits of information, whether it’s news, job posts, company information, a personal story, or a simple random thought, in a matter of seconds.

On a busy day, Twitter sees about 175 million tweets and about 300,000 new visitors on a daily basis. With numbers like these you’d be out of your mind not to consider Twitter as a viable source to connect with your employees as well as potential candidates.

Both, individuals and companies are currently using Twitter for their own benefits.

Uses/Benefits for Individuals:

1. People can receive information instantaneously: Twitter allows people to send and receive messages when they occur. It keeps them informed about popular trends and topics and they can also stay informed about what is happening in the world by just checking their cell phones.
2. Connects individuals with other professionals and companies: Twitter can help people establish new professional relationships, developing collaborative networks and creating new contacts in areas that interest them.
3. Fast and brief information: Short messages allow direct and accurate information in a short period of time.
4. Bring out people’s creativity: If you're a creative editor, freelance editor or writer, Twitter can help you develop content that is more direct and effective.

Uses/Benefits for Companies in terms of HR:

1. Self-promotion: If you are an HR professional looking to promote your employer brand, Twitter can help you reach your target audience. This could be your employees or candidates for your job offers. Tweets rich in content such as: company information, job postings, tips and advice for applying and information about what it's like to work for the company are all an excellent opportunity to engage with your audience.
2. Connect with customers and fans of your brand: Through Twitter companies can communicate directly with their most loyal followers, thus generating good public relations. It is also a great channel to receive feedback about your product or service. This initiative consequently affects your employer brand. Moreover, there are a ton of weekly chats that you can participate in that will help you engage with others registered in this social media platform.
3. Connect with your employees: Use this network to connect with your employees. Congratulate them through Twitter when they are hired, when they achieve an important goal or even when they get a promotion.
4. Advanced search: Acting as one of the largest search engines Twitter has become the top spot for HR professionals to look for candidates to fill job vacancies.  Advanced search queries are popular among recruiters and other professionals that are looking to data specific to a topic, location, and even defined radius. If I am a recruiter wanting to find those searching for a sales job, within my city and again within 30 miles of my corporate office, that’s possible.
5. Free marketing: If a company wants to reduce their marketing budget Twitter can definitely bring economic benefits. Through twitter you can advertise for free your job openings or promote the next Job Fair that you will be attending.
6. More traffic: through Twitter you can generate more traffic to the company website or blogs. Twitter updates may carry links to the company site or different blogs that the company promotes, which added to a good number of followers, can help the company get more visitors to their own website. You can even have links that direct your target audience to a specific page on your website, for example the page where you post your open jobs.

Using Twitter is up to you, but I strongly recommend you to give it a try if you haven’t and of course let me know how it went.

Introducing HR to Social Media

Nowadays, the business and marketing areas in all types of organizations are using social media as new channels to increase brand visibility and generate greater intimacy, relationship and communication with customers. They are sharing information and creating a community truly engaged with their brands.

So… Why don’t we apply this in the Human Resources area? The Web 2.0 and social media in general offer us many ways to show our own employees, prospect employees and clients who we are. They also help us enhance our brand as an attractive and innovative employer brand.

What can you do?

• Facebook page
• Twitter account
• YouTube channel 
• Discussion groups on LinkedIn
• A corporate blog

There are many channels you can use to engage and attract you talent, however, beyond strategically choosing the best channel in which to participate, you must take into account certain points:

1. Provide valuable content to engage people. Content that will persuade your company’s talent or future talent to visit your website, comment on your blog or like your Facebook page.  Once again, it doesn’t matter which channel you have chosen to use, what matters is the content within it.
2. Be active! Tweet, post, like, comment. Constantly update your website and your blog. Offer your employees a space online where they can share and engage beyond the walls of your organization. This is also an opportunity to let people get to know you beyond the traditional corporate speech.
3. Invite your employees to participate in these channels. Involve them as much as you can, let them be the authors of your blog. They are the main characters of your corporate story, the living example of the reality you want to show to the world.

If you decide to go for it, don’t forget that the new challenge HR professionals are facing is to stop limiting themselves to the traditional HR techniques: a static corporate intranet, email marketing, ads, online job postings and cover letters with dull resumes. Today, with the support of social networks attracting our current and future talent is based on: providing valuable content, chatting, posting, interacting, sharing and most importantly being transparent.

The talent is online. Let’s engage and make your organization the most attractive place to work.