We like to keep you posted on all aspects of marketing your recruitment website, and Twitter this month has made the news with three major new features:

Twitter Ads for SME’s

Up until now Twitter ads were only available to larger companies and more widely in the USA. Twitter has now released on demand advertising which allows any size firm to take advantage of audience targeting and promoted tweets, advertising to a specified budget and paying per interaction – follow, retweet, favourite or click.

Twitter has partnered with O2 in the UK who are offering a social insights tool, a business leadership board where you can compare your firm with other SME’s who have signed up with O2 and get £50 worth of free advertising.

There are options for Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets and to target the 230 million twitter users by:

  • Keywords in a timeline
  • Interest
  • Geographic location
  • Gender
  • Similarity to other followers
  • Device
  • Keyword search results

Find out more about targeting options from Twitter here https://business.twitter.com/targeting

As with Facebook Advertising, Twitter Adverts will allow recruiters to promote both services in general and specific vacancies choosing to only pay per click as the job or landing page is viewed. With some expert application and targeting this may well become a valuable tool in filling vacancies but as with any advertising effective monitoring of ROI is essential.

Custom Timelines

Potentially less relevant for recruitment but still a substantial development Twitter have also in the past few days announced a Custom Timeline feature available through Tweetdeck which allows users to curate tweets on an event, subject, hashtag or trending topic and is an offering to rival that of Storify. This allows multiple timelines and creates a feed which users can follow tailored by you which can also be embedded onto websites.

Receiving Direct Messages

Both free and with the prospect of being quite useful is the new option for Twitter accounts to a “Receive messages from any follower” even if you are not following them back, previously not allowed. This function can actually allow some anonymity for potential candidates to enquire without visibly showing an interest in your recruitment firm. This article from Undercover Recruiter explains how to take advantage of the feature.