I have an on-off love affair with Twitter. Sometimes, I use it loads. Sometimes, I forget it’s there and then there is a delight in re-discovering it. I use it mostly for business, although I do follow a few friends (and a couple of celebs, but I’m embarrassed about doing that so let’s not dwell on it). I don’t live in London and am only in the Shoreditch office two days a week so there are few opportunities to network face-to-face. Twitter is a nice way of finding out what’s going on in the industry, and building relationships with practitioners. These relationships are useful to me in three ways; firstly, I edit espresso, a weekly e-bulletin which we fill with PR and media news and feature career tips and industry insights. Quite often I find interviewees or industry spokespeople through Twitter and I also use it for leads on industry stories. Secondly, I used to be a recruiter. I no longer recruit directly but I do have connections with Unicorn Jobs and Taylor Bennett and run their diversity internship programme. Relationships with PR practitioners helps me raise awareness of the programme, and have led directly to donations of time, money and training to the interns. Thirdly, it’s good to just know who is out there, who are the influencers and who is the young blood to watch. And sometimes, I get to give a little something back – like last week when a student asked me to give some advice on how to get into the PR industry.
Yesterday, I received an email from a Twitter account. It was anonymous – in that I know which Twitter account it is but there is no way to know who runs it. I am not going to disclose which account contacted me, as I’m rather interested to see if anyone takes them up on their offer and so will be keeping an eye on them.
Anyway…. this is the email:
Hello,
I am writing to see if you are interested in taking over the Twitter account ******, including its large follower base of job seekers. The account can be renamed and rebranded, giving your brand and jobs a huge audience, saving time and advertising costs.
The account can be found at ***** and is followed by a community of PR professionals who are actively searching for their next role through social media. These job seekers have the online skills PR employers are looking for and are engaging with this Twitter account to find their next job. The account is currently tweeting a feed of job postings from various sources, and followers are clicking through to the job postings to find out more. For this demographic, young UK-based PR job seekers, this is the largest Twitter community I am aware of.
Taking over the account would put your jobs in front of the right people without having to spend money on advertising. It could also significantly help to establish your brand on Twitter. Twitter allows changing the names of accounts, and the followers will be transferred over to the new name.
Please get in touch if you would be interested in discussing this more.
This is my reply:
No thanks. I run a Facebook group, PR Job Watch, with over 3,000 members. We don't need to buy Twitter accounts, we can develop our own. Twitter is all about building relationships.
I'm not sure it's really in the spirit of social media to be "selling" your followers.
Regards
Sarah
And their reply:
Very true. Some do a great job, like Unicorn Jobs, but others look for shortcuts.
It is unfortunate, while there are those looking for shortcuts, there will be a market for things like followers. And when there's a market, there are those desperate enough to feed that market. Still, it isn't like it is being sold for spam. I am targeting relevant people who will take care of my followers. Atleast, that's what I keep telling myself.
Thanks for getting back to me and keep up the great work.
ps. I love your esPResso newsletter
I mentioned it on Twitter last night and a couple of people expressed outrage at the thought of followers being sold. I actually *am* a follower of the account in question, and I am not that happy about being sold myself. But maybe I am behind the times? Maybe it is acceptable to build up relationships and then sell them on? Perhaps the likes of The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den are encouraging such entrepreneurial spirit?
It still doesn’t sit quite right with me. I will be watching with interest to see if a PR recruiter takes them up on it though.
