My Spidey-sense tells me it’s time for another post on Twitter, so I’ve gathered up some of the best articles, ideas, and resources that flitted across my browser during the past few months, and here they are, with brief notes:
1. I recently sent a Twitter “survival kit” to some small business friends who are struggling a bit with their tweeting efforts. Here’s what I included:
- The Art of the Tweet. A classic!
- Thirteen Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners from Darren Rowse’s blog TwiTips.
- A very high-level Twitter-for-Business FAQ–plus a link to the excellent TforB resource Pistachio.
2. The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter starts at a basic level, but goes much further–and offers great graphic examples.
3. For those further along (or just curious), here’s an assortment of good Twitter discussions:
- Twitter for Business: Four Ways Companies Use Microblogging
- Blogging vs Twitter (A Few Random Thoughts on the Two Media)
- Why You Need to Twitter
- Find the Right People to Follow on Twitter
- How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter
- Putting Twitter’s World to Work
4. See what happened at TWTRConSF, and find out what’s coming up at TWTRConDC (in October).
5. To get the most out of Twitter, it’s a big help to have the right tools. Here’s an overview of general purpose tools, plus a link to one tool designed especially for businesses that use Twitter:
- 10 Twitter Tools that Help You Work Smarter and 10 MORE Must-have Twitter Tools
- CoTweet lets you monitor keywords, follow conversation threads, assign tweet follow-ups, schedule tweets, and much more.
6. About Twitter for recruiting:
- Check out TwitterJobSearch from the recruiter viewpoint
- See a video covering How to Recruit on Twitter
- Get an advanced education on Twitter searching from Boolean Black Belt
- See the Top 50+ Employers Recruiting on Twitter
Of course, the burning question continues to burn. Will Twitter become a permanent feature of online life, dwindle away as the novelty wears off, be replaced by something completely new/different, change dramatically, or . . . ? Remains to be seen, but in the meantime, it makes sense to engage with Twitter–but do it smartly.
Cynthia Giles has followed a serpentine career path from academia to publishing to marketing and design to information technology and corporate communications. There’s plenty of detail about this journey at www.cynthiagiles.com, but briefly--the common theme has been ideas, and how to present them effectively. Along the way, she became an accidental expert on data warehousing and business intelligence, and for the past ten years she has combined corporate contracting with an independent consulting practice that focuses on marketing strategy for smaller businesses and non-profits.
Having spent quite a bit of time looking for work, and anywhere from two weeks to two years inside a wide variety of American companies—she has given much thought to what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to creating a great employment fit.