Here is the second of a series of hands-on examples – based on some specific searches in the UK – on how to use some People Sourcing concepts. The same techniques can be applied to searches elsewhere.
I’d like to discuss following a list of people on Twitter.
Let’s start with creating a list of people, in this case, UK-based recruiters. I think it was Martin Lee who first pointed me to the interesting way Bullhorn Reach constructs their user profiles. Based on what we see, here’s how we could create an email list of UK recruiters:
site:bullhornreach.com/user intitle:uk
Any email extractor can now be used to create a list of email addresses that would look like this:
Here’s a question for the reader: what search would you run on Google to find additional UK-based recruiters who are not included in this list?
(By the way please don’t think that if you have a list of emails it’s a reason to send emails; it’s not what I had in mind at all.)
Now, I would like to follow these people on Twitter. To start with, I import the above list of email addresses into a Gmail account. This, by the way, will show everyone who is already present on Google-Plus:
Then, on Twitter, I point to that Gmail account and get suggestions for following. I can then mass-follow the list.
(By the way, please note how few of these people we would have found by searching their bio’s for the words recruiter or recruitment. That’s a reason why sourcing on Twitter by searching bio’s may not be as productive as it may seem.)