I came across this today http://twitiq.com/ its a twitter “client”, that allows you to manage your Twitter account though an interface that is like Twitter only better. You can have multiple twitter accounts, and manage them quite well. You may prefer tweetdeck, but I think this is quite neat.
When I said last week about Twitter going down., I was joking, but it seems that they’ve been suffering outages over the weekend.. oops.
A couple of things have made me think over the last few days. Things are moving so quickly in social-media-land its hard to keep up. Just as we get used to using a site, it changes, even before we’ve memorised our password, they’ve merged, changed strategies, gone bust, or completely revamped the product. A few examples:
TR.IM – having been used by thousands of people for shortening URLS on their posts, it announced its closing down. That’s gonnaurt a lot of people.
Facebook aquired FriendFeed – and now facebook lite has been announced. No doubt changes all round.
JS-KIT – A great comment, rating tool plugin has relaunched as “Echo” and dropped their rating tool altogether – just as I was about to implement it on PharmiWeb.com. (http://beta.pharmiweb.com) - Argh, now I need to start looking for a replacement.
All this makes me realise that we are putting a lot of trust into the stability and longevity of these tools. Maybe we should get back to developing our own, at least we know it will be around for a while. URL shorteners for example, they are not difficult to develop, maybe every site should include a perma-link generator. Maybe also we all get carried away with the latest gadgets, and wizzy must have’s, without comparing the practical use and benefits against the risk. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, would your marketing or development strategy fall to dust. I hope not.
OK, I posted 5 jobs on TweetMyjobs.com, selected at random from my current top jobs. According to their stats, I recieved the following clicks…
Posting the jobs in the first place, was a manual process, and I found no way of automatically posting them through an API, so long term its not particularly viable.
When you post your job (through the very clunky interface), you select a preferred channel. They then push the job out to an appropriate twitter account. They have “5000″ channels. However., many of these “channels” have only a handful of followers, and you know as well as I do that a good proportion of these will be “twitiots” who are spam or will follow anything in the hope they get their own followers up. You can re-weet too (for a cost), but its not automatic, so you’d need to log back in and re-weet (as I did) .
Overall I’m not that impressed with the experience. I certainly won’t be paying for it. Having said that, I think it’s early days for Twitter recruitment, and I think that it has some way to go before people look at it as a useful way of finding jobs. I dont think any of the people that clicked on the twitter posts actually applied for a job, so quite franky I have better ways to be spending my day.
Unless you’ve had a better experience….
PharmiMike Rating 2/10
Having been a twitterer (is that in the Oxford English Dictionary yet?) for a while, I cant help noticing that I get a lot of followers who clearly have no interest in me, and are only looking to “expand their following”, as they seem to have that as their objective, either for some “I can show you how to become a millionaire with the secret of the internet they don’t want you to know, but I will sell you for only $50 a month” scheme. This is a shame as it will potentially lead twitter into chaos and confusion. (OK maybe I’m guilty too to a degree) . So how do you try to keep you follows pure. Well, I have a few tests I like to keep in mind when I scan down my daily list of “new followers”:
So I guess, the ratio of those that follow me to me following them is about 20:1, not a good sign for the future of twitter.
Another job board powered by Twitter and recycling content that already exists. Nice to see we are in there, but so far I’ve had a single click through!
Another Twitter Job Board
It does make me think more about my Twitter strategy for PharmiWeb. Currently I’m pushing out selections of jobs on various categories (client, region, job) to a number of different twitter accounts, but its getting more and more complicated as I add more, and harder to keep track. I’m actually not that convinced about the responses or the quality of the candidates we get from it, bu it does constitute “noise” so I guess its a form of marketing!
This one looks reasonably organised, and has a reasonable interface. Largely US based, but currently free to post, but only manually and limited to 5 ads per hour or 12 ads in a 24 hour period.
They have an API (geekspeak for you can get a computer to talk to it) to allow you to query their jobs, but not one for posting jobs. I’ve requested that thet pick up feeds from PharmiWeb.com – we’ll see.
Job Shouts - Twitter Job board
Just came across this site / service which I will check out and review.
Apparently : The world’s largest Twitter Job Board! Currently tweeting over 300,000 jobs!
Over 65,000 followers on our 5,000+ Job Channel network. 6,000+ companies represented.
Push your Jobs to Twitter?
Personally I’m not that impressed. Its clunky and doesn’t do a vast amount that cant be done with a couple of hours of time.
This looks interesting… essentially a “micro-forum”
“Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed”
Possible use for customer support?
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