Did you know that the average human when they focus their eyes only uses 3% of their available field of view?  This means that 97% of their field of view is peripheral – outside of their immediate field of view.  

From a business development and client relationship perspective, this is a real pain when you want to attract attention from busy people who are in your client base.  Using social media is a great way of tapping into your contacts’ peripheral vision and keeping in their “mind’s eye”.

There’s a term called “splatter vision“ where you look toward the horizon without focussing – this allows you to have a greater handle on what’s in front of you. Did you know that the FBI use this skill to spot baddies in crowded areas?

Well, funnily enough, your current and potential contacts do not use splatter vision day to day (unless of course you supply FBI agents – now that would be a USP!).   Your contacts are focussed on their own lives,  jobs, emergencies, emails, phone calls, sandwiches, etc…  You are probably nowhere near there 3% focus.

What’s the benefit of staying in their peripheral vision? You create a comfort factor; they know who you are, without really engaging, and will feel more comfortable when you contact them.  Better still, they egin to research you as a result of seeing you online.  I had a conference call recently to a client in the states, and one of the attendees remembered my LinkedIn polls – this really helped the call!

So how do you stay in your contacts’ field of vision – and without ringing them and emailing them every 5 minutes? Social media is a great way of getting into your contacts’ field of vision, without them having to adopt “splatter vision”.

Also known as inbound marketing, this concept is all about creating content that gets you found and attracts attention.  There are hundreds of ways to do this using social media, and it is not as time consuming as you may think, and should NOT be restricted to your Marketing department’s activities.

Status updates in LinkedIn is a great example. God forbid, I am not referring to recruiters bleeting on about jobs all day long. (I have blogged enough about being a consultant not a job board). A decent status update in any social media platform should give a feel for who you are, what you do, what you read, what events you go to, etc… ie. it should give me, the audience, a really good “feel” for what our relationship could be like.

Guest blogging in your clients’ back gardens – what stuff do they read? Trust me, they are not on the edge of their seats waiting for Recruiter Weekly to drop on their doorstep, so think about your contacts and their sector and typical issues.

LinkedIn Polls, Facebook competitions, Twitter updates, Pinterest boards… never before have you had such a great opportunity to market your business.  So, use social media to keep in your contacts’ peripheral vision – this will increase your social media profile views and web hits, help you get through more gatekeepers, secure more meetings and then you can get on the good stuff: dazzling your contacts face to face with your expertise.

I will be presenting at UK Recruiter’s Recruitment Technology Showcase event on 24 May, London.  Maybe see you there?

We work with Agency Recruiters, HR teams and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies. If you are looking to develop your strategy, please get in touch.

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Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line.

Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blog, check out her Pinterest page and connect via LinkedIn.

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I’m getting asked by a lot of my clients – “Should I be on Pinterest?” so I wanted to post a blog on where it’s at and get you thinking about whether this will help your business.

I never ask any of my clients to join a new social media site without first considering “what’s in it for them”.  We are all too busy to drop everything for the next new craze; I’d rather leave that to those who have time to kill…

But, Pinterest has become a VERY exciting medium and one that I am talking to my clients about, so I wanted to share my thoughts on it.

What is Pinterest?

It is a pin-board style social sharing website – thus you have the ability to grab images / content from the web and pin it to your pin board – people can follow your pin board – thus you share your content that way.

It’s an invitation only site – thus you need to be invited by an existing user to use it (please get in touch via Twitter if you want an invite).

Some stats to whet your appetite

• Fastest growing site in social media history – it’s currently 16th most popular in the US, and 27th in the UK! (According to Alexa)
• It is currently sending more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and Youtube combined (pretty impressive)
• It’s not just being used by retailers to flog stuff… General Electric, Carousel Consultancy
• Demographics – initially very heavily female, but starting to even out
• 30% of followers earn >$100k
• Average time on site: 15.8mins (YouTube = 16.4mins, Facebook =12.1mins)
• Largest chunk of users aged: 25-44

First of all, some interesting stats from Bullhorn Reach’s report:

POINTLESS!

If you know anything about hashtags, you’ll know that the whole point is to help people find stuff in the 33 billion tweets sent per day.  You wouldn’t add a job to a job board simply with the category “Job” – so why do it in social media? (Previous blogs on hashtags will give a little more information if you’re wondering what the hell I am bleating on about).

I have met a couple of recruitment businesses recently who can’t see the point in Twitter and want hard facts (£-related) before they invest in this medium.  The stats above speak very loudly that Twitter is a major force in recruitment, and for many of my clients is really reducing their job board reliance (and spend).  So, Twitter is a piece of kit that can save you money and attract applications… who wouldn’t want that as an outcome?

So the stats, coupled with the lack of decent job postings on Twitter led me to the following conclusion…

If the average follower number for recruiters is only 37, AND recruiters are not marketing their roles on Twitter effectively using hashtags AND Tweeters are three times more likely to apply for a role, then  what’ll happen when recruiters get more followers and use hashtags appropriately?  They’ll get a lot more applications and bingo, we won’t be discussing whether Twitter is great for recruitment, we’ll be celebrating the use of social media to attract talent and stop wondering whether a tweet can make us hard cash.

It’s so easy to use and has some nifty benefits:

• segment your followers by category (people you are following that aren’t following you back, vice versa, users who are inactive, influencers etc…) – lovely stuff!
• You search by adding lots of lovely filters – eg: timezones, language, how often people tweet, what their bio contains (eg. English, London, Java Developer)
• You can follow / unfollow people according to criteria – really handy!
• You can see how influential people are – great for knowing who to connect to and who is likely to help you market your tweets
• You can export your Twitter followers to .csv files to backup
• If you ask it nicely, it will tell you the best time to tweet (see gorgeous graph below)
• You can analyse other user’s Twitter accounts (secret squirrel)
• You can even see who is following you that’s “famous” (Maria Shriver??)
• and lots more…

In brief (and I appreciate that these are US stats, but the effects are global.

Of those surveyed, Job hunters:

• 29% use social media as their primary job hunting tool
• 46% spend 6 hours or more on social media sites job hunting

Companies:

• 57% says it improves company branding
• 52% of companies day social media produces more applications

BUT 92% of companies only spend 10% on social recruiting initiatives! (what’s the rest going on; job boards / adverts?)

This looks to me like the candidates are sending out quite a powerful message to recruiters… “Get with social”

What are you doing with social to attract applicants, and please don’t be happy if all you are doing is tweeting your jobs via an automated system (see previous blog on Are you a Job Board or a Recruiter?)

Watch the TweetMyJobs video on Social Recruitment here.

We work with recruiters, HR teams and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies. If you are looking to develop your strategy, please get in touch.

Click here for more social media posts.

Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line.

Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blogand connect via LinkedIn.

If you like this article, please share it or subscribe.

So, you may have an account, or you simply paste your long-winded URL into Twitter and hey presto, it shortens it, but here are some other benefits that you need to know about which will give you some great intelligence over your links and click throughs:

• You can track / analyse what kinds of clicks your URL has received.  You can see what countries are clicking onto your links, what the source of the click is, there are some lovely graphs and data in this area of bit.ly

• You can customise your URL, eg. www.barclayjones.com/blog could be amended to: bit.lyBarclayJBlog which could really help with branding and also increase the confidence of the user to click onto the link (in these spam-ridden days…)
• You can setup a nifty Sidebar Bookmarklet (say that 3 times without stuttering), which allows you to shorten and analyse on the fly
• You can link it to multiple Facebook and Twitter (not LinkedIn Boo!) accounts so that when Twitter, for example, shortens a URL for you, it links back to your Bit.ly account
• If you want to be really clever you can also amend the bit.ly bit to your domain – eg. The New York Times uses “nyti.ms” as their short domain (you will need to buy your shortened domain first though)
• Need I say “It’s Free“? And it takes seconds to create an account – lots of my clients get really giddy when we introduce this, as it gives them eyes and ears over their content which they may have not had before.

I love apps, especially those that save me a little time and help me be better at what I do. I have been using Followerwonk for some time and wanted to share what it does for me.

Social media has obviously added to my business process, and Followerwonk has a number of nifty little features which helps me measure my effectiveness and reach.

Search Twitter Bios

You can search for keywords, location specifics, follower/following counts, and then sort by relevance or follower count. Pretty handy stuff! Great for finding candidates if you are a recruiter.

Compare Yourself to Others

This finds unique and shared followers for any 2-3 Twitter users. A great way to see how you compare to your competitors.

Analyse your Followers

How many people are you truly engaging with? Breakdown by account age, dormancy, follower count, and more – apparently 38% of the people I follow have an undetermined sex! (Read my mind…)

Track your Social Graph

A subscription required is required for this (boo!), but you can see how your social graph grows (or shrinks) from day to day. This is a powerful way to track how your tweets are being received.

Let me know what you think.

We work with recruiters, HR teams and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies. If you are looking to develop your strategy, please get in touch.

Read more social media or Twitter posts.

Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line.

Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blogand connect via LinkedIn.

If you like this article, please share it or subscribe.

You probably know that you can search Twitter but did you know that you can use some operators to help you with these searches?

I can’t accept credit for this table – I simply copied it from http://twitter.com/search

Think about how you could use it to find what you need, eg:

“IT manager” ;( (finds tweets where IT Manager is mentioned and the tweet is negative

“IT Manager” near: Leeds (does what it says it does…)

Happy searching!

We work with recruiters, HR teams and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies. If you are looking to develop your strategy, please get in touch.

Click here for more social media posts.

Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line.

Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blogand connect via LinkedIn.

If you like this article, please share it or subscribe.

Alexa.com is a great site which shows the rankings of websites around the world.  

It’s worth keeping up to date on which ones are at the top, especially if your strategy part relies on the rankings of sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter etc… You may even want to know how yours ranks?

Note the current rankings, and note who (globally) achieves the tops slots:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. YouTube
4. Yahoo
5. Baidu
6. Wikipedia
7. Windows Live
8. QQ.com
9. Twitter
10. Blogspot
11. Amazon
12. LinkedIn

We work with agency and corporate recruiters and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies.  If you are looking to develop your strategy please get in touch.

Read more social media posts and web posts.

The discussion rapidly diverted to social media and it was obvious from the questions being fired at me that decision makers in recruitment firms have lots lots of issues / ideas about social media.

As a result of this Louise has kindly asked me to attend the next event on May 24 (it’s free to attend and you can book your place here) and run a session devoted to the topic of social media in recruitment.

I am running a poll in LinkedIn to find out what people want to hear about.  Please take part and let me know your thoughts. http://linkd.in/InY2kR

We work with recruiters, HR teams and B2Bs to help them with their social media, web and technology strategies. If you are looking to develop your strategy, please get in touch.

Click here for more social media posts.

Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line.

Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blogand connect via LinkedIn.

If you like this article, please share it or subscribe.