I was asked to speak to NPA Worldwide, a global organization of personnel professionals, in a workshop for recruiters.  Social media and recruiting go hand-in-hand, especially in today’s climate where finding the ideal candidate is the name of the game.

Fortunately, social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook provide some amazing tools to allow recruiters to target potential placements.  We all post such detailed personal and professional information about ourselves in online profiles that can all be easily searched, that means that finding that ideal candidate is (or can be) easier now than ever before.

Time
One obvious issue that was discussed is the time investment required to be successful in social media.  Several of our participants today voiced concerns about the level of involvement needed. My thoughts on the large time investment are this:  if you are spending tons of time on LinkedIn and you know that it’s working, then that’s obviously well worth the effort.   In order to justify the time, you have to be monitoring your social media efforts and quantifying your results.

PLET
I presented my PLET method for using social media, which covers the basics that everyone needs to know if you’re going to successfully take advantage of these new media channels: Post, Listen, Engage, & Track

Here are some examples that I covered for how recruiters can use this methodology:

• Posting information is crucial, and content is still king! But don’t just throw out your job posting like every other recruiter does- find some way to “hook” people and get their interest. Keywords are crucial, but finding your (online) voice and letting your personality show through are important.
• If you aren’t measuring it, then you can’t improve it (or for that matter, know if it is worth your time investment).  Measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts is a must – so using tools like URL shorteners (bit.ly) that allow you to see how many clicks you’re getting to job postings can go a long way towards helping you start to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
• Listening for opportunities is one of the chief ways to take advantage of online tools.  Google alerts to monitor for lay-offs or openings is a free way to extend your ability to know what’s happening.  We also discussed the importance of organizing all of that kind of information, and using RSS feeds with Google Reader is a brilliant way to not only organize, but it will give you the ability to do searches as well.
• I talked a lot about the great tools that Google provides, and Analytics was another one.  Knowing that your site or blog is getting increased traffic from wherever you are spending your time promoting is just as important as knowing if people are hitting your links.  The reason we can be so good at online marketing is because we can measure it on such a granular level!

We just finished up Day 4 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business that Howell Marketing is hosting with us.  We covered a lot of ground today – and I worked hard to make sure that the information was tailored to the questions that our crowd had yesterday in the Facebook 101 course.

The most pressing questions had to do with effective methods for using Facebook Fan Pages to market a business – a burning question in a lot of marketing minds right now.  I covered the Fan Page sales funnel that is a great method for drawing people to your Facebook presence, engaging them, and offering multiple ways for them to take action.

Here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Day 3 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business was an intro to using Facebook for marketing your business.  Since our surveys told us that most of the class already had accounts, we decided to skip the really elementary material and jump right into something really helpful: how you can separate your personal and professional life on Facebook.

Like all the other days of this seminar, we talked a great deal about strategy.  If someone doesn’t claim the saying “in all things, have strategy” then I’m going to!  Here are the slides from our class today:

Tomorrow we’re going to cover:

• Fan pages vs Groups
• Advertising
• How to grow your Page and add Fans
• Best practices for B-to-B organizations

LinkedIn recently announced a way to allow you to tie your Twitter status updates to your LinkedIn status.  That’s great news!  (Except for those of us who spent hours figuring out the best way to make that happen 6 months ago, of course).

With that capability from LinkedIn, you no longer have to use Ping.fm and a Ping-capable Twitter client (Twhirl ruled for this very reason, and Tweetie for iPhone did as well, but has recently dropped Ping.fm integration in their newest version).
Here is my thoughts on why you would not want to link your Twitter status to LinkedIn:

The audience and messaging is completely different!  The very conversational style of Twitter does not exactly trasnslate to the more static and less-interactive status updates on LinkedIn.  I personally struggled with this for a while before deciding to turn off the old system that I used to achieve this (using Ping.fm).   Many times I didn’t even think about it- but then I would login to LinkedIn and see that my last update was a picture at dinner or something from the previous night.  That wasn’t the kind of content that I wanted people to see on my profile, so I killed it.

This has a lot to do with our discussions in class this week on using Social Media for Business: the importance of maintaining your professionalism on social networks if your goal is to promote/use for your business.

One other thing we covered is the TweetDeck, which recently released an update that solves many of these issues for you.  The latest version (v0.32.0) eases these issues by allowing you to pick and choose which networks you would like to post to:  Multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook (both personal profiles and pages you administer), and even MySpace.  Very cool – check it out!