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Is Twitter a Powerful Business Tool, a Cool Social Connector, or a Huge Waste of  Time?

Gen Y in the Workplace--Are Twitter and Social Networking Websites the New Email?

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Social Networking and Generation Y in the Workplace--the New Email?

By Eric Hellinger

I remember when I was a young professional first entering the real job market, I had an executive who could not see the need in that "ding dang" email. It was a pure time waster in his mind. On the other hand, I embraced the technology and saw immediately that while it could be abused, used correctly, it made me much more efficient. Now, hitting 40, I look at the rapid expansion of social networking and am tempted to rail against those "ding dang" time-wasters.  Like it or not, social networking is a business reality.  

    Here are a few ways I see social networking providing business benefits:

Generation Y Works to Live, Not Lives to Work Like Previous Generations--Technology Is Always There 

Social networks can provide employees with "whole person" benefits. Not many Gen Y and Millennials "live to work" unlike previous generations.   The line between work and the rest of their lives is thinly drawn.  They text message family more than twice a day. 

They are the first generation to be born and come into the workplace, never having remembered when there was no email or Internet.  They are stimulated and motivated by technology.  They are continually expecting "what's next" will be faster and more intricate. 

Being open to technologies that allow employees to "live while working" can increase engagement and productivity.

Gen Y Responds to Social Networking

·     Social networks provide insane access to knowledge. A few months ago, we had a benchmarking vendor offer to connect us with "like" companies to discuss succession planning efforts. With one post to LinkedIn, I was able to reach out multinationally to get direct references on the nature of business within these companies, insight on cultural dynamics, and organizational structure. We went into our benchmarking effort knowing much more than we could have gleaned through our own resources.

A number of employees use these sites as a type of "multi-tasked" break. Break rooms are becoming obsolete as employees hit these sites instead of the break room. The downside is that the internal networking that could occur through downtime may not occur. 

How One Professional is Making Social Networking Work for Her and Her Company

Twitter has to be a passion:  "10+ Tweets a Day to Gain a Following"

By Sarah Welstead
Director, User Experience
Head2Head Canada Inc.
 

You Have to Know  Where You're Going--and Be Cool When You End Up Some Place Else

Social networking only delivers results for business if you go into it with a clear idea of what you'd like to get out of it - but accepting that it's highly likely that you'll end up getting something completely different out of it.

For example, in my role at Head2Head, I initially started twittering under the @RecruitingH2H name, thinking that Twitter would be a good way to promote our jobs to candidates.  At first, most of my tweets were just job opportunities.

It Takes at Least 10+ Tweets a Day

That was fine, but I realized that (a) no one wanted to follow me because the tweets seemed too boring; (b) as a small company, we didn't have 10+ new jobs to talk about every day (and you really do need to tweet 10+ times a day in order to build followers);  (c) while I wanted job-seekers to follow ME, I didn't really want to follow THEM, because reading the tweets of unemployed people was neither interesting nor educational.

You Can't Just Tweet--You Have to be Interesting

But Head2Head's core competency is 'recruiting recruiters' (we place more contract recruiters, on- or off-site with  clients, than anyone else in North America), so I decided it might make sense to build a network of recruiters (because of the nature of their work, recruiters tend to be early adopters of social networking tools, so there were plenty of them on Twitter).  And I realized that the best way to build followers is to be interesting - which means including personal, funny and interesting tweets that have nothing whatsoever to do with 'business'.  People whose tweets are always stuff relating to their profession, with no personal comments whatsoever, simply aren't popular, because the great thing about microblogging is feeling that there's a real person on the other end.

You can Form Professional Alliances with Other "Tweeters"

So I stopped posting so many job opps, started following other recruiters who looked interesting, tried to inject some humour into my tweets and profile (my Twitter bio includes "Fond of non-sequiturs.  Newt fancier." - which makes it clear to potential followers that I'm not just some boring B2B person who wants to promote Head2Head 24 hours a day. 

The result?  Well, I'm building a follower base slowly but surely.  (I say 'slowly' because it's my opinion that you get a more stable follower base if you make sure that the number of people you follow is always LESS than the number of people following you.  Sure, if you follow 1500 people, a few hundred of them will follow you back - but when other people see that you're following 1823 people and only 432 are following you, they assume that you must be boring or desperate.)

You Can Build Your Brand with Twitter

More importantly, it's already starting to build the Head2Head brand:  in the past couple of weeks, Head2Head staff members report that when they're meeting new candidates or clients for the first time, many of them are saying, "Oh yes, I've been following you guys on Twitter - Head2Head is everywhere!  You guys really ARE super-connected in the recruiting industry, aren't you?" 

Twitter Can Bring People To Your Blog

And Twitter has driven a huge increase in our blog traffic - in the past 2 months it's become one of the top 10 landing pages on the Head2Head website. 

From a personal perspective, I've been surprised at just how much I've LEARNED about recruiting in the past few weeks.  I'm now following 350+ recruiters, so my Twitter feed is always full of links to interesting recruiting-related articles, blogs, people and ideas.  This is also paying dividends for Head2Head, too, because that learning is then disseminated within the organization.

Your Expectations Have to be Flexible

Bottom line? 

Twitter didn't really deliver against what I thought it would when I started, but is turning out to deliver benefits I hadn't anticipated initially.   I  would say the same about sites like Facebook, too, although it's interesting to note that the Facebook application we built (to automatically feed a 'HotJobs' alert for candidates) and launched earlier this year hasn't been as popular as we anticipated.  There is some evidence to suggest that the Gen Y crowd simply isn't using Facebook to find jobs these days - they come to Facebook to interact with friends, not to do 'business'.

LinkedIn doesn't deliver a whole lot of benefits for me personally (and I haven't yet seen it deliver a lot of benefit for the brand, either); however, our recruiting team says searching LinkedIn is one of the top 3 things they do when they're looking for candidates for specific jobs - they say it's much more effective than searching job board databases (like Monster) or even Craigslist.

Probably more than you wanted to know, and as I said I'm 80% convinced this was just a generic request, but if you really are writing an article, I hope this gives you a useful quote or two.