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!

I gave a workshop this week for the Sales & Marketing Society of the Mid-South as part of their new workshop series for their members.  We covered our 4-step program to using Twitter for marketing or promoting a business,  The PLET Method:

Post  |  Why, What, When, How

Listen  |  Real-time searches and Monitoring Tools

Engage  |  Rules of Engagement, Best Practices

Track |  Analytics, URLs, Phone numbers

Here is a copy of the presentation that we went through. Although none of the screen-capture movies are there, you can still get the main ideas behind the PLET method:

More and more businesses are recognizing the need to get involved in social media, which means that social media “experts” are popping up left and right.  Beware anyone who tells you they are social media expert.  Here’s a great example of why I say that:  Click here But beware, definitely some R-rated language (funny though).

Three of my favorite points from this workshop were my reasons why everyone should get involved in social media:

1. 3 out of 4 Americans are using social technology
2. Typical cost of a social media account is $0.00
3. Social media is like word of mouth on steroids

It’s exciting that so many of those in the workshop were totally new to Twitter and wanted to see if Twitter had potential for their marketing and communications. With so much buzz coming up, we’ll have another series of classes on social media very soon with our friends at Howell Marketing Strategies.  More details on that soon, but this time we’re planning on a 4-day workshop, focusing one day each on:  Strategy, Twitter, Facebook, & YouTube (but possibly SlideShare or LinkedIn as well).

Now that you know how to create URLs that can be tracked and measured, let’s get into a little more about how you can use them, and ways to streamline the process.

I use Bit.ly links for every single thing that we post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and also in email newsletters.  The majority of this activity is posting on Twitter, so let’s start there.  That is, after all, why these shorteners became so popular in such a short amount of time.

Twitter has that glorious 140 character limit, so we need a way to post succinct links to blogs that have long, SEO friendly URLs (like the one you no doubt see in the address bar of your browser if you’re on this blog).  But wants to go back to the actual Bit.ly site?  That takes too long!  You need a Twitter client that has Bit.ly integration so that it will short the links for you, using your previously created Bit.ly account.

I personally use Twhirl as my desktop client since it has such great multi-account support, but there are other clients out there as well.  Bit.ly has a list of tools you can check out to find something that suites you.

The thing on that list that I want to point out is the Bit.ly Bookmarklet.  This might be really useful for you, since some say that the Web is still the most popular Twitter client.

Bookmarklets

According to the Wikipedia, a bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page.

That means you can add this to the toolbar in your browser, and create shortened, trackable URLs with no effort at all!

So now- I hope that sufficiently explains it.  I have been getting a TON of people asking about this!  We’ll get back to the more esoteric stuff in the next post =)

There is a lot of talk about the ROI of social media.  This is a tough thing to judge- no one will argue that point.  But there are things that you can do to ensure that you’re recognizing if your efforts are having any kind of positive effect. I get asked about this a lot so I’m going to do 2-part guide that hopefully you’ll find useful.

The first is to start tracking your URLs. If you post a link, then you probably need to know how many people had clicked on it, right?  URL shorteners are perfect for this.

TinyURL used to be the only thing that I knew about, and then what happened- Twitter exploded, growing 1382% from Februrary ‘08 to Feb. ‘09.  People needed a more elegant solution to understanding how all these Tweets were being used, so came the slew of URL services that are available now:  Bit.ly, ow.ly, tr.im, just to name a few.

I would say that Bit.ly is in the lead, but that could change by the time you read this. According to Mashable, Bit.ly was on its way to crushing TinyURL shortly after its 1 year birthday in mid-July.

How do I use a URL Shortener for tracking?

I’m only going to cover bit.ly since that is all I use and I find it to be the best service for my needs. You’re going to need an Account on Bit.ly before you do anything, so go create one.   Once you get an account created, the interface should be pretty self-explanatory on the site itself.  Step 1: paste link into box.  Step 2: Click ‘Shorten’ and there you go.

The power of Bit.ly is that you can then go back to your account and see detailed stats of how many clicks were made on your link, when they were made, and to some degree- where.

Once you add a few links, you’ll be able to see the whole list of them.  You’ll see the title of the page you linked, and you’ll see two numbers.  The smaller number on top is how many times your shortened link was clicked on.  The second, larger number is the number of total clicks to that link that could be tracked by Bit.ly.  This means that you’ll see how many people clicked on your link vs. the total number of all clicks on Bit.ly links that go to that page.

Viewing your stats, the easy way:

You can always scroll back through your Bit.ly account page if you’re looking for a specific link, but I find it easier to just keep note of the top shortened URLs that I need to track.  For example: I’ll make several shortened URLs for an event registration page, and then use those links on different channels like Facebook, e-mail blasts, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Then I can track exaclty where our traffic to the registration page is coming from.

To go back through page after page of my links on the Bit.ly account page is time consuming. I usually just take note of the Bit.ly link itself. If you have the link itself and want to see your results, you simply insert ‘info/’ into the Bit.ly URL and there you go.  Like this:

Original link:  http://bit.ly/rvShT
Info Link: http://bit.ly/info/rvShT

Got it?  Just insert the info/ like this:  bit.y/  info/ rvSHT

That link will take you right to your info page, and you can see all for your stats like so:

And then a little further downthe page, you can see the dates that people are hitting your link.  Check it out- you can view in real-time, or historically like this:

You can use these shortened (and more importantly, trackable) links anywhere- not just Twitter.  Next time you want to see how many people are coming to your site from a specific channel that you’re using to communicate – try it!

We’ll cover a little more in-depth in Part II – like how to integrate Bit.ly into your Twitter client so that you can shorten links on the fly.  We’ll also talk about how Bit.ly can integrate with TwitterFeed so you can track any RSS links that you’re posting.