Sourcing Techniques using Twitter



Twitter Definition :

Its Micro- Blogging.It is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.

One of the biggest values of Twitter is the relationship building/ networking, and connecting. Its a very powerful marketing & community building tool.

The messages on twitter can be sent via text or instant messaging, e-mail, MP3 or the web. Twitter can be used to quickly get out the latest news and really useful information. A new position in the co.; referral programs, employee news etc.



How to use Twitter for Recruiting?



Here I found some tips which you can try and get yourself experience this tool



1) search.twitter.com (Formerly Summize)- It searches tweets from any twitter users.

So lets search who's talking about "ASP.NET" with in 50 miles of 07645

(my work area) zip code in the last two months and I always see job ads form career builder so I would negate that.

So inputting"ASP.NET -CareerBuilder.com since:2008-06-01 near:07645 within:50mi" I get so many people "tweeting" about ASP.NET. Isn't that interesting



If you aren't familiar with boolean operators for twitter use the Advanced search tab in home page OR maybe you want o get familiar with the search operators in twitter

Now it doesn't end there as you can RSS (Feed for this query ) to your reader and automatically see twwets talking about "ASP.NET" your company , about you ....



2)Tweetscan

Boolean search: -, OR, and quotes works for Tweetscan

Include/Exclude users by putting the username or -username in the User Search box.



3)Tweetbeep

TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. It gives you twitter alerts by email when a tweet matches your search



4) twithire.com

A Free Job Board for Twitter. On logging in twitter;n you choose a category and generate a key which links you to your twitter page where you enter the Job Title, Company name, Location and URL for the actual posting.

Twitter must be boring for many as why the heck I want to know what you had for breakfast today but there's more to it about getting personal, networking, socializing, employee/ment branding ,news update etc.

Using Twitter for Active Candidate Identification

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering if you should and how you can leverage Twitter in your ACTIVE talent identification efforts, you’ve come to the right place.

While Twitter is an intrinsically shallow source of human capital data (140 character Tweets and 160 character bios), unlike Facebook - it is quite searchable. In this post I am going to review and compare 6 effective methods of searching Twitter for ACTIVE candidate identification: Twitter’s Advanced Search, Power Twitter, TweetDeck, Twellow, TweetGrid, and X-Ray searching Twitter



Searching Twitter with…Twitter

Twitter’s advanced search interface and functionality is quite robust, supporting standard Boolean search with AND (any space is an “implied AND”), OR, NOT (via the - sign), and phrase searching, as well as special search operators such as the hashtag (#).

Three of the most useful search features of Twitter are hashtags, geocoding, and RSS feeds. When it comes to trying to find people with specific skills who live in specific places, being able to track groups/conversations via hashtags and to search by location is HUGE. Also, it’s highly convenient to essentially convert a search into an RSS feed that you can keep tabs on.



Searching Twitter with the Power Twitter Extension for Firefox

If you use Mozilla’s Firefox Internet browser, you can harness the power of Twitter’s search functionality right from your browser with the Power Twitter add-on.

Once you download and add Power Twitter to Firefox, you can conveniently type your searches into the Power Twitter search bar located at the top of your browser window:

Searching Twitter with TweetDeck

T

weetDeck is a fantastic application I use to manage Twitter - I highly recommend it. Not only does it allow you to easily track Tweets, replies, and direct messages - you can also use it to run searches and keep tabs on the results in real-time.

TweetDeck supports AND, OR, NOT (- sign), phrase, (quotation marks) and hashtag (#) searching. Click on the image below to view a short video of how to execute searches for candidates using TweetDeck (please be patient - it might take a few moments to load):



Searching Twitter with TweetGrid

TweetGrid is an interesting application that allows you to create a Twitter search dashboard that updates in real time. TweetGrid supports AND, OR, NOT (- sign), and phrase searching (quotation marks). It also allows for reliable location searching via geocoding and the near/within operator combo. Here is the full list of TweetGrid search operators/functions.

With TweetGrid you can configure and create a search dashboard to track and display the results of multiple searches - you can choose how many searches you’d like to track.



Searching Twitter with Twellow

Twellow is a solid Twitter application that affords users a number of benefits. Searching Twellow to identify potential candidates can be accomplished using Twellow’s own take on the standard Boolean search operators: AND (&), OR (|), NOT (-sign) and phrase searching (quotation marks).

What’s great about Twellow is that unlike Twitter’s Advanced Search, Twellow searches text in Tweets AND in the bio and location fields. Additionally, Twellow also supports field-specific searching with the @ operator - allowing you to target words and phrases in the name, screen_name, location, bio, and extended_bio fields. Click here to see a complete list of Twellow’s search operators.



TwellowHood

Before moving on, I wanted to show you an interesting feature of Twellow that involves an interactive map that you can click on to zoom-in to explore locations in the U.S. and Canada to find lists of people on Twitter by city.



X-Ray Searching Twitter

If you don’t want to use someone else’s Twitter application to search for people on Twitter, you can always try and use an Internet search engine to X-Ray Twitter for the information you need. Thankfully, Twitter is very “X-Rayable.”



For example, let’s say you’re targeting people who mention PHP and who live in the Atlanta area. You could go to Google and enter this:

site:twitter.com atlanta php ~develop -jobs

Here’s a snippet of the page 1 results (over 400 total results