Twitter: Is Anyone Even Listening to Recruiters?

"If my Twitter account gets zero retweets or mentions, what's the point?" is a common complaint with career-oriented and employer-brand accounts — and with good reason.

Although social media is considered a pull-marketing method that allows the target audience to find a brand on their own, the reality is that it can be a little hard to differentiate yourself (and your brand) amidst a sea of tweets. After all, how much is there really to say back to something like, "Job Open! Apply Now!"

Even so, some brands opt to strengthen candidate relationships on other platforms, while others aren't really interested in striking up any kind of conversation at all.

For those wishing to increase engagement with people who follow the brand or with potential candidates on Twitter, here are 5 simple steps to start with:

Twitter offers two ways to put your best foot forward and attract users to your profile: a cover photo and a profile photo. Make sure you use a high resolution photo, at least 300 pixels per inch. Your profile image should be 81 x 81px and the cover photo should be 520 x 260px. Your "in-stream" profile image is 48 x 48px, so keep that in mind when choosing an image. One great example is Taco Bell’s career account: it has a clever cover photo, clearly recognizable brand profile picture.

Your bio should clearly call out who you are and what your purpose is. Sharing jobs with no intention of responding on this account? Let people know that. Call out the account where they can engage with you. Take a look at how Harrod’s career account has handled itself. They’ve done a good job of calling out when followers can expect engagement from the account.

Being a conversationalist is the goal, but don't go overboard. Watch your post-to-engagement levels. If you broadcast non-stop and don’t engage, you risk being tuned out; but if you post every 15 seconds, you’ll likely get unfollowed. Here are some good rules of thumb: four tweets per day seems to be the magic number for business brands, according to a survey by BuddyMedia. Any more than that and the survey found diminishing returns on engagement. I don’t know if I fully agree with this because it’s worth noting that the lifetime of the average tweet is 90 minutes. The main point is to ensure that your tweets aren’t overtaking people’s newsfeeds.

Sharing a news article? Give your opinion to increase conversation opportunities. Links are great to include if a wider reach is the goal: they get two times the engagement rate and are 86 percent more likely to be shared than tweets without them, according to a Buffer report. Want a specific tweet shared? Ask for a "RT" and receive a 12x jump in engagement. Or, better yet, spell out ’retweet’ for a 32x greater likelihood that your tweet will be shared. 100 characters or less seem to be "tweetastic" when it comes to tweet length without links — they boast over a 17 percent rate of engagement return over those with more than 100 characters. If your tweet has a link, 120-130 characters is the most engaging for your audience.

Those who used hashtags got twice the engagement of those who did not, yet only 24 percent of brands use them. This is a big area of opportunity for recruitment marketers to differentiate, but be careful how many hashtags you put on a tweet. One hashtag is great can garner a 24 percent bump in shares, while two creates 21 percent more engagement than those without. However, at three hashtags the engagement levels drop by 17 percent, says Buffer. Don’t forget to tweet on the weekends — the report shows that Saturday and Sunday are the highest days of the week for engagement. Yet only 19 percent of brands tweet on the weekends, leaving a lot of room for your company to stand out.

Photo: Can Stock