Top 5 University Recruiting Twitter Accounts
140 characters. It’s such a small amount of text, yet it can have a BIG impact on your university recruiting efforts—if you go about it the right way.
Twitter can be a new and exciting way to reach potential applicants and build your employer brand among college students. It helps establish a more personal connection than newsletter emails or other forms of social media, and its ever-changing functions mean that you’re no longer limited to plain old text, but have the option to include links, images, and videos.
But the best companies know that Twitter isn’t just about promoting yourself—it’s about listening to others and sharing great content.
We combed through a wide variety of university recruiting Twitter accounts and chose our top five favorites.
How did we make our decision?
We used the following criteria:
- Does the company have a dedicated university recruiting account, not just a general careers account?
- Is there variety to their tweets? Do they include photos, videos, links, etc. or just text?
- Have they evolved beyond simply promoting themselves? Do they respond to tweets from applicants and share worthwhile content from other sources?
1. Johnson & Johnson
Why we love @JNJUniversity: They tweet several times a day, and their tweets feature a good mix of self-promotion, topics that are relevant to college student job-seekers, and photos/video.
A few recent tweets:
Note their use of the new “pinned” tweet feature to draw attention to one of their more significant tweets.
This is great use of the FF (short for “Follow Friday”) hashtag. It’s used to share some of your favorite Twitter accounts with the people who currently follow you. It’s an excellent way to help your followers discover other people/organizations that tweet on relevant topics.
Reaching out directly to UPenn students and offering $1,500 to sponsor one of their events. What’s not to like here?
2. Intuit
Why we love @IntuitStudents: They tweet several times a day, interact with others by retweeting and sharing, and offer a good mix of career advice and Intuit-specific news.
A few recent tweets:
Retweeting shows that you are engaged and listening to what’s going on in the Twittersphere.
This tweet promoting an upcoming event gets all the details across while using relevant handles and hashtags.
Sharing useful job search content from career site The Daily Muse. This is an excellent practice. Our only suggestion for improvement would be to include “from @dailymuse” so followers know where you’re sending them!
3. Salesforce
Why we love @SalesforceEdu: Even some of their self-promotional tweets are fun and include things like photos of the office dog and customized hashtags (#puppyforce). We also commend them for responding to individual applicants.
A few recent tweets:
Photos give an added depth to tweets.
Responding to an individual question with relevant link = awesome customer service. Shows that Salesforce cares about their applicants.
Cute dog and company-specific hashtag—what’s not to love?
4. Liberty Mutual
Why we love @LMICampus: They tweet several times a day and use Twitter to share their company culture, promote job opportunities, and share relevant content.
A few recent tweets:
Colorful image that gives you a glimpse into the Liberty Mutual externship program.
Clever use of the “TBT” (throwback Thursday) hashtag to commemorate last year’s interns.
Pretty standard job opening tweet, but it works because it’s not the only type of content they share—it’s sandwiched between other types of tweets.
5. BlackRock
Why we love @BlackRockCampus: They tweet a good mix of photos, inspirational quotes, and useful content.
A few recent tweets:
You don’t always want to post networking event photos, but there’s nothing wrong with including them occasionally.
Starting a tweet with someone else’s handle? Make sure you include some other symbol first, like @BlackRockCampus did here, to ensure that ALL your followers see it, not just the people who follow you and the person you’re tweeting.
Great idea to share relevant content. We’d just suggest that they add “from @inc” to let followers know where the article came from/where you’re sending them.
We hope this guide has shown you a thing or two you didn’t know about Twitter and given you a few ideas for how to launch your own university recruiting program account.
The next step: If you already have a Twitter account, choose one or two of the ideas we’ve discussed to incorporate into your own account. Take a photo or video, retweet or share some useful content, or make use of the “FF” or “TBT” hashtag. If you’re just getting started, spend some time following these companies and others whose university recruiting efforts you admire. You don’t even need a Twitter handle to get started—you can just look at their Twitter profiles online and scroll through their recent tweets.
P.S. Want to see all these tweets together? We compiled them into a post on Storify.
2 Responses to “Top 5 University Recruiting Twitter Accounts”
[…] a past post, we named our top 5 university recruiting Twitter accounts. In case you missed it and don’t feel like clicking on that link right now, here’s a quick […]
[…] We’ll come back to the actual content of these tweets later, but I’d encourage you to go through this process with a few different organizations. Just check out their Twitter feeds and see what they’re posting. (Need a few ideas of which accounts to check out? See our post on the Top 5 UR Twitter Accounts.) […]