I bet some of the earliest tweets on record peddle job opportunities. Hashtags and an API turned the volume up to 11. Then automated services blew up. Names like TweetMyJobs, Tweet A Job, and Tweet Jobs were born, and job postings have littered the Twittersphere ever since. A search on Twitter on “#jobs” reveals accounts with handles like @NeedLS_Staffing, @eMarketingSilo, @jobely, and @TopTech_Jobs, all of which seems to exist for the sole purpose of distributing jobs on a mass scale.
But, since users only see tweets from accounts they follow, or voluntarily search or click, it has mostly been no harm, no foul. In fact, at least in the early days, Twitter seemed to actually be working for some employers as a job search engine. The whole thing became commoditized, and there are very few, if any, services that just do automated Twitter postings. However, many services, such as CareerArc, promote it as a feature.
Job distribution wasn’t the only automated service, of course. Auto everything, such as following, liking, DM’ing, and retweeting, soon became a part of Twitter’s DNA. In fact, a recent study says 48 million accounts are bots, representing about 15 percent of accounts. That’s a big problem, and the advent of “fake news” and Trumpbots in our daily lives meant Twitter had to fix this issue or risk further degradation and loss of real humans using its platform. Turns out, losing ground to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are good motivators too.
Fixing it, they are.
An auto-Twitter solution for marketers called Jooicer recently sent out a message to users outlining recent challenges with Twitter. “As you probably have noticed, in the last months we have been experienced a degraded and poor service due to the fact that Twitter is trying hard to cut automation services,” the company CEO said in an email. “We have tested several ways, even residential proxies (which has a huge cost), in order to surpass the last measurements, but I’m afraid to say, that so far we haven’t found an effective way to do it.”
Translation: It was fun while it lasted, but Twitter is putting us all out of business.
Of course, you’ll still be able to manually promote job postings on Twitter, as well as include hashtags like #jobs, #job, #engineering, #nursing, and whatever else. You’ll also probably still be able to distribute jobs automatically as you post them, similarly to how you can automatically share LinkedIn posts to Twitter. However, the days of machine-gunning tweets over and over are waning. If this is your primary means of recruiting, you’ll want to start looking elsewhere.
Ultimately, the move to squash bots on Twitter is a good thing. As a loyal user since 2007, I can confidently say bots don’t make the experience better. In fact, they make using Twitter a real bummer at times. Removing automation from Twitter will help humanize it again, and in the process, hopefully bring it back to prominence. Which, in turn, may actually make it an effective recruiting tool.