This guide is not meant as an end all to Twitter and using Twitter in your advertising or marketing strategy. Every business has to approach Twitter differently. This guide just covers the basics of Twitter and how to use it effectively.

First off, open a free account at Twitter.com. Avoid using long screen names like BarbadosOctopusAssociates. You are limited to 140 characters in a tweet and many Twitter users get their updates on their cell phones via text message. Since those are limited 160 characters, a shorter name would server you well once you are up and running on Twitter.

Now once you are set up, you can post. You may find yourself confused or lost in Twitter. It takes some time to get it, some time to understand how it works. Hopefully, this guide can jump start that process.

You will notice you start off following people by default. These people are selected by Twitter staff as long established Twitter users. You may want to stop following them as I am mostly sure their tweets will not be relevant to your career and company, let’s work on finding people that might interest you.

Surf over to ExecTweets.com. It is a website for executives in all industries who use Twitter effectively. Click on the BROWSE BY INDUSTRY link and select you industry. Read through those tweets and see if there is anyone saying something you find interesting. If so, click on their photo (this takes you back to the Twitter site) and click on FOLLOW. This will put their tweets in your homepage. Add somewhere between 10 and 20, this will give you enough to start getting a feel for how the system works.

Or if that sounds a bit daunting, here are some corporate Twitter users you might find valuable, regardless of your industry. Just click on the word FOLLOW under their pic to add them.

http://twitter.com/mridley
http://twitter.com/philjohnson
http://twitter.com/CandidCIO
http://twitter.com/stormbear
http://twitter.com/TEDchris
http://twitter.com/jillwhalen

Once your home page is fully populated, you will see strange things and unusual shorthand notations. There are three things you need to understand, the use of the @ symbol, the # symbol and the compressed URL.

Here is a sample message from me to Twitter user, NimbusAgency

@nimbusagency The Future of HR Was Here 2 Years Ago – http://is.gd/pMOV #linkedin #twitter #facebook #jobs #hr

What in the world does all that jabber mean? Here is the Tweet broken down into the vital parts…

This tweet was directed to user NimbusAgency. When you put the @ symbol in front of an individual’s Twitter user name, a copy of the tweet will end up in their Twitter account. This allows you to carry on a conversation. If you every want to tweet to me, simple use @stormbear somewhere in your tweet and I will get it.

The second part of the message is a title of an article I wrote, The Future of HR Was Here 2 Years Ago.

The next part, http://is.gd/pMOV, is a condensed URL to the story. Remember, each tweet is limited to 140 characters. The original URL for this article is…
http://www.stormbear.com/2009/03/30/the-future-of-hr-was-here-2-years-ago/

That URL has over 50 characters, so you need to shorten that down. Surf over to http://is.gd and take a look at them. Just paste the URL you want to shorten into the box and click compress. The next page will show you a shortened address. Just cut and paste that link into your tweet and save space.

The last part of the tweet has a string of words that has the #symbol in front of them, these are called “hash tags.” They are keywords for Twitter. Sometimes your tweets will use all 140 characters for the message you want to convey. But many tweets you have room left over, that extra room can be used for hash tags. Think of a one word description of what your tweet is about and type that word in and make sure it has the # in front of it. Below are some sample hash tags.

#marketing #jobs #weather #bailout #apple #porsche #wedding #lasvegas #fashion #advertising #sushi

Remember, you can use any word as a hash tag, but only one word. If you want to use Las Vegas as a hash tag, take the space out as in the example above.

For more information, check out the above YouTube video from one of the founders of Twitter.

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Flash forward to today, they are just now learning how to empower their business with LinkedIn. They have been big believers in Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs. Does any of you know someone who has gotten a job through one of these services recently? When job searching, I have used those three sites, and never get any response. To me, it is like putting a resume down a big dark hole. I know when I submit there, I will probably never hear from anyone. CraigsList is a different story. There I get responses, even though it might end with a signed contract, I do hear from people, make business relationships and grow my network.

The future of HR is not going to be found in Monster, CareerBuilder or Hotjobs. LinkedIn makes it kinda easy to find candidates, Facebook makes you work for it. Where LinkedIn is a top-down data delivery system, Facebook requires a mixture of top-down and grassroots work to find candidates. The latest media darling that is now being used in employee placement is Twitter. With Twitter, there is elbow grease involved. Using Twitter for finding employees is a total grassroots effort – networking in its purest form… and it has been around for more than 2 years.

Success in employee placement, today and in the future, will depend on how well your you can mine social data. The days of having it handed to you are more or less over, and that is a blessing. Now when you advertise a job on a site like Monster, you open yourself up to a deluge of resumes and the grid on your time becomes heavier the more jobs you advertise. For some, ten job listings on Monster a week is 10,000 resumes to sort through a week. Even on Craigslist, I know of local jobs that have received 400, 500 and 700 responses. Cold calling is mostly fruitless, spam filters kill off all but a few unsolicited email attempts. Today the answer is the trifecta of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The answer has been staring us in the face for 2 years. Who knows what next year will look like.

Now if I could just sort tweets by hash tag and location…

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