Finding your own community online

Now that you're on your way to mastering the Twitterverse, let's take a look at how communities come together on social networking sites. Once you've found your own way to find the communities you'd like to be part of, you'll have developed an understanding of what holds diverse communities together; you'll then be able to apply this to build a community around your organization's brand.

So, let's find your communities, those groups of like-minded individuals you'd like to connect with in your personal and professional life. Are you a new mum? A commuter cycling to work each day? A football fan? A photography enthusiast? Whatever you're in to, there's a community online to feed your personal and professional interests. As we'll discover, the ways that you find and connect with your community are the ways your recruitment strategy will seek to engage with potential employees.

Here are some ways to find your community:

• Twitter hashtags: Hashtags are a way people categorize their Twitter posts, linking it to other posts in the same category. For example, the hash tag #careeradvice is used by many recruiters with followers who are actively looking for work. If you see a few posts from an interesting Twitter user, you can navigate their network to see who they follow to find some more interesting people.

• Meetup.com: Strangely enough, this online platform is an ideal way to connect in real life with like-minded individuals in a specific geographic area. For example, I'm passionate about software development practices, so I've searched for this along with my home town and I've connected with a great group of people with a shared interest.

• Blogs: Some people are amazingly generous with their time providing regular, thoughtful web blog entries; the challenge is to find these people's blogs among the chaff of inane and badly written blogs that are out there. For example, if you're a keen cyclist doing a regular commute and you do an Internet search for "blogs", "cycling", and "commute", you'll find some blogs of varying quality. Once you've found a blog you like, you may find they reference other good quality blogs.

• Yammer groups: If your organization uses Yammer, you have a ready-made community with your colleagues. For example, you may find that a Yammer group already exists for fellow football fans, or you may need to start a group where people discuss the sport and their favorite teams.

You may notice we've been using a search to find someone interesting, then navigating through their publicly-known social network to find more people with a similar interest. This means we're quickly finding people who are worth listening to rather than just searching online against keywords. The people we find interesting are more likely to connect with other people we'd also be interested in.

This principle applies to recruiting for different roles, since most of your target employees aren't following your company's digital presence, and they may not even be actively looking for a job. Finding and connecting to your target candidates, who may not be actively looking for work, becomes a matter of finding and connecting to the right communities.