Why Twitter's New Tailored Trends are a Recruiter's Best Friend

Yesterday Twitter announced that they are rolling out deeper personalisation in the algorithm that displays trending topics to each user. Last year Twitter moved from showing the top 10 trending topics globally to showing local country trends and now they are going one (well actually two) steps deeper. From this week, users will begin to see trends that are customised by City (in certain countries) and influenced by whom they follow. The former is nice but no huge deal, the latter is most definitely a big deal and here’s why.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about hashtags and how many recruiters are finding that they aren’t getting any results from tagging their job postings. In that post I discussed how hashtags are by default listed by “Most Popular” and not “Most Recent” hence if you or your tweet is not “Popular”, most people are never going to see it. Even if you have a large following, you have to make sure that you tweet when people are listening as the default activity feed is displayed in reverse chronological order, i.e. newest first.  If you are trying to reach new followers, people who don’t currently follow you, you need to do one of the following:

1. Tag your posts with keywords and hashtags that general users might search for

2. Hope for (or solicit) re-tweets or favorites from influential followers to “bleed” your content into their fans’ activity streams

3. Follow everyone and hope that they reciprocate (I personally hate this, even though I know it works, well sort of works)

4. Promote your twitter handle in other online or offline places (slow moving unless you have a big marketing budget)

5. Jump on the bandwagon by tagging your posts with trending topics keywords/ hashtags

The latter strategy is often employed by spammers; in fact once you start being mentioned by a host of hot babes with X and Z in their name, you can guarantee that you’ve just tweeted on a trending topic! I would never advocate jumping on the bandwagon as the relevancy factor is poor. However, with personalised trending topics, there is now a huge opportunity to leverage trending topics that are more likely to be relevant to your followers and your expertise.

Think about it. If your content strategy is all about engaging with developers, chances are that the people who follow you also follow similar people. Just run a follower cloud search on the average person’s followers and you can see very easily how often there is a match for related keywords in follower bios (Followerwonk can do this for free as long as the user has less than 1000 followers). If you’re being followed by people who follow the same people that you follow in the same location then your trends should be similar. If you want to reach a potentially large (yet niche) audience, tweet out some relevant content and start engaging in that conversation.

I expect that Twitter will continue to tweak their Trends algorithm so that no one person sees the exact same list. This is powerful and is no doubt going to further improve the overall user experience. LinkedIn have attempted this with their LinkedIn Today product that produces a personalised newspaper based on your profession. The new Twitter Trends should go one step further. You choose whom to follow and Twitter shows you the top trends from those people. This is the power of big data on a micro level.

If you want to upgrade your Twitter account to personalised trends, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to the Homepage on Twitter and navigate to the Trends section on the left hand side of the screen and click “Change”

2. From the list of global countries, select your country (or the one closest to you)

3. If you can further select by city or state, do that.

4. You are now seeing local, customised trends.

How do you build followers and influence on Twitter? What do you think of the new Trends feature and how will you use it?