Shouting in a soundproof room with the doors closed

[Bill Boorman]

I was shocked and concerned to not come up on @BrainGain's listing of recruiters to follow on twitter, especially as two of my competitors were there loud and proud, though they rarely contribute to social media. Mr.Angry from England posted immediately with a list of another 20 names that were missing. At 100 tweets a day, i felt i was a valid entry.
The answer lies in the fact that i'm not a techy, though i'm starting to think that way. I was reading a blog today from @CarlChapmanSr on SEO. It's preety clear now why so many people read his blog. It's a good blog but not a great, great blog (no offence Carl), but it is simple to find in a search and is syndicated with many other blogs. With so much out there, few people stumble on you, you have to be found. Seems i've been working hard to get followers through content and merit, but i've been shouting loud in a soundproof room with the lights off. Time to turn the lights on and open the doors.
I'm going to find @booleanblackblt and quiz him on the best way to be found. I have 1600 followers on twitter and 1000 on Li & my Li group through hard work. How many more can i get through visibility? It is at least as important as content.
Thanks @braingain You didn't find me, or others because i'm not listed as a recruiter (in the UK we are known as Recruitment Consultantnts and i'm a trainer.) I'll let you know how many more followers i get.
What are the must include terms and titles for being found, and what advice can you give a social media amateur on SEO?

Bill

[Mark Powney]

Adding your LinkedIn and outlook contacts to Twitter

Bill you may have done this already but thought it might be useful for those who have not.

Twitter only allows you to invite contacts from gmail, yahoo and aol accounts so if you havn;t got one - set one up.

Now export your contacts from your linkedIn and outlook address books and save them on your pc. Save as csv file

Next go into you gmail account and import these contacts using your saved csv file.

You can now go into twitter and invite them all

Really worth doing if you are looking to increase your followers.

Hope this helps

@m2rk (Twitter)

[Irina Shamaeva]

@BillBoorman you must be kidding... you have such a great content on twitter (the requirement number 1 to get followers!) that you will get lots of followers in no time. You are absolutely doing the right thing.
I enjoy your posts here quite a bit!

My post was to show some sourcing technology and get attention; I didn't seriously mean to list "the" recruiters. I guess the post's title was a bad idea and I apologize for that.

Of course one's twitter following matters some, but it is of no use if you are being followed by random people (this is what all these new twitter services provide). What matters is the number of targeted followers.

One can check one's following out by going to friendorfollow.com, getting an excel file and examining it.
Moreover, the same tool can be used to find more people to follow. If you have a competitor who you think is doing well on twitter, go to friendorfollow.com again, download their following, examine it and start following those who are your targeted audience; they may follow you back. (Let me know if you want a demo.)

Cross-posting of links to articles helps as well. As an example, I have set this page on my personal Boolean Strings site and it has been bringing quite a few readers here. Cross-posting to other LI groups helps too. In fact, I see that links posted in LI groups have been bringing more people here than twitter; this is probably because there are so many links posted on twitter and not as many on LI. Also if you post on a particular LI group, this already addresses a targeted audience (as opposed to a twitter post).

Irina
@braingain,
a @BillBoorman's follower

P.S. And by the way I think that with the advance of twitter and with the LI groups at your service you can worry less about SEO than even 6 months ago.

[Carl Chapman]

Bill,

I have a very strong belief that in order to be found, you have to rank well on major search engine results pages (SERPs) and to do that, you need a blog on your own, self-hosted site, with a well chosen domain name. My advice would be to create such (or hire someone to do it, which is a service that I provide) and then just feed your Ning profile with your blog's RSS feed.

I don't think the big social media sites are very good at helping individuals grab top rankings. Not sure if you checked out my post "7 reasons you shouldn't have a website" (which is on my 'company' website) but it lays it out pretty well.

You might also want to check out our SEO Services tab.

[Dorothy Beach]

Hi Bill and don't be too hard on Irina (@braingain) - she was trying to be helpful to her followers. But to your point about wording - I tell people I train that the Twitter bio doesn't need to be in English. The keywords are more important - so for you the bio might be : "trainer, recruitment, recruitment, blogger, radio guy" or something like that - those words that best describe you. People will find these words and follow you. I'm not an expert on SEO - can't help you there. But a point on international presence - what words describe recruitment in other countries? When I search for mainly US recruiters I have to add these words: talent, people, staffing, recruiter. Maybe you should add these too to tap intot he US audience? I am also thinking about LinkedIn's summary section - used as keywords and not in English. What do you say?

[Shannon Myers]

I understand this post is about more on how to be found but reading your post and responses brings up another question.... Is there sometimes too much of something even if it's a good thing? Sometimes when someone begins posting overboard online I find I tend to tune out. Even if it's someone or a brand I am really interested in. Does anyone else find this happening? If so what are your limits before you start tuning someone/something out?

[Carl Chapman]

Shannon Myers said: Sometimes when someone begins posting overboard online I find I tend to tune out. Even if it's someone or a brand I am really interested in. Does anyone else find this happening?

I do, when I see someone spambot Twitter with 10-20 near simultaneous posts, I usually 'unfollow'... blogs, not so much, because I have a choice of seeing that stuff.

[Peter Gold]

Bill

Maybe you were not on the list because you just RT everything anybody else says - where is the value to anyone in that? 100 tweets doesn't make you good; 100 cold calls but not one new vacancy - what would be the point? You've some way to go Bill.

Peter