Agreed that there are too many paid-services that merely replicate what one can do for free. Twitter is a remarkably easy publishing platform.

That being said, there are free job board platforms, free ATS software, free operating systems, etc.

It has only been recently, that we've started charging for some of our professional feed management services but this has been based upon working with 1000s of companies that we've seen emergent best practices and have incorporated them in our services in the following areas:

Twitter Clients: At least 30% of twitter activity is through 3rd part clients (like TweetDeck), are your feeds optimized for them?
Real-Time Search Engines: Tweets are the basis for dozens of real-time search engines (like oneriot), are your feeds optimized for these?
Bing/Google: Recency is an increasingly important part of the relevancy algorithms for major search engines, and Tweets are being indexed, will yours be?
Timing/Frequency: When is the best time of day to send tweets, how often should they be sent out.
Facebook Connect: Can your tweets/feeds be "liked"
SEO: what are best practices to have your tweets rank better and how best to structure/deliver your activity stream updates to help the your site's rankings.
Building up followers: Does your feed management system also have mechanisms to help job seekers discover/follow your accounts?
Indexing: where will your job tweets be indexed and for how long?
Geo-tagging: Are they optimized for location-based services?
Tracking/ROI: can you track performance of your Twitter campaigns?
Annotations and other Meta-Data: Does your feed system add meta-data and/or annotations to Tweets. What protocols are they using for them?
And dozens more....

In order to better understand the Twitter/Activity-stream ecosystem, our company has built leading real-time search engines, a location search engine, Twitter Clients, and have built products in partnership with TweetDeck, LinkedIn, Google (launched a product 2 weeks ago at Google I/O) and others. Through this product development and these partnerships, we bring extensive experience to these areas.

This, plus our direct reach to an audience of 700k job seekers/mo, is what our clients pay for. If they just want to have their job tweets buried in the 55 million daily tweets, we agree they should just tweet them.

Bill
http://TwitJobSearch.com

Agree with you Thomas,

Learn how to do it yourself or via your existing ATS.

There are some great sales sharks in the marketplace at the moment.

There's all kinds of things other than just automated tweeting that need to be considered if you're actually going to see a return on your efforts.

Bill's already given you a great list above, I could add a load more - but I'd rather strim it to a more simplistic parallel question:

Do you rely simply on your own careers site - or do you also engage with expert job board partners?

If you're able to recognise your own limitations, then you can make informed decisions about paying for support in the right places.

Do not pay to post your jobs to Twitter = agreed.

Thank you,
Jeremy Langhans

I agree, anybody can tweet a job. It's probably the best way to understand how the Twitter ecosystem works. The challenge is how to effectively tweet. There's some important things to consider when using Twitter to augment your recruiting efforts. Bill mentioned some good ones above. Here's some more:

1) Targeting. If you are simply doing a feed to your Twitter account of your jobs (e.g. rss2twitter), How are those tweets getting in the hands of jobseekers? If you are expecting jobseekers to simply follow your account to get your jobs, then yes, those job tweets will show up in their feed. But is the signal to noise ratio too low? Why would a Sales Executive in NY care about an IT job in LA? This would be especially true for corporations with multiple locations. Most jobseekers are interested in a particular type of job in a particular location. Following a corporate Twitter account doesn't necessarily achieve that.

2) Post Management. Does your feed remove the job once the job gets filled? If it doesn't how does that affect your (or your company's) brand when a jobseeker starts clicking on jobs that are no longer active? (spoiler alert - NO auto-feed to Twitter removes tweets. It's fire-and-forget). How does the employee who got that job feel when he/she finds the job still posted on Twitter? How about refreshing the job? Tweets can get pushed to the second page of your feed pretty quickly. Are you getting enough eyeballs on the job?

3) Geotagging/annotations. Is your tweeting efforts preparing for the next wave of mobile recruiting? The jobseeker of the near future will not be typing queries in a search box to find a job, or wait for the daily email of open jobs. Smartphones/ipads/mobile devices are going to be the window into the workforce of tomorrow. The jobs are going to find them through geotargeting/relevancy technologies.

4) Time. Managing your job tweets should NOT be a core competency for a recruiter, recruitment department, or a recruiting organization. Recruiters should be doing what they do best, recruiting. If you feel that an auto-feed to Twitter is enough, re-read #2 above.
We are currently working with hundreds of companies as their Social Media Recruiting solution. Our platform solves all of the things I mentioned above, and more. Yes, we do charge for our service, and our customers value that service because it makes them more effective.

Gary Zukowski

Stupid. Don't pay for a free service.

SEO optimisation for job ads my arse.

You should be writing a job ad for the JOB SEEKER not the search engine

I miss your blog posts on "thou who shall not be named"

J_T

I have to disagree with the posts from the vendors. Show me some stats and success stories from AUSTRALIAN recruiters or companies.

If you are saying that the job tweets are not put into "someones" feed, where are the applicants coming from?

Oviously the candidates are not coming through from the Twitter feed as all you have to do is look at the bit.ly stats by putting a + at the end of a shorterned URL and see the click through numbers.

Next you will be trying to convice us to start using Second Life for recruitment.

LOL

Same as Lydia.

I don't care about what is happening with "social recruiting" in the US or UK. Show me how job seekers in Australia are changing?

SEEK attracts 4m users per month, and you are telling me to either drop or move my ads from a medium that gets job seekers resumes (not all the best, but every candidate is another one to add to our database) to a service where users are not on Twitter to search for a job, but socialise with peers?

Yeah right. I bet SEEK, MyCareer and Career One are shitting themselves all the way to the bank.

Interesting tinyurl stats. I didn't know about the open statistics

Interesting thoughts, but still...if your existing ATS or multiposter isnt able to integrate with the Twitter API it may be time to change provider. It's not rocket science.

@Lydia - Yes, I have had multiple success stories from recruiting via Twitter at the start.........but nothing recently.

@J - I really want to write about them again. Some interesting problems with clients. Watch this space.

I agree, there is a lot of noise from US and UK recruiters about using social tools, but we must keep ourselves grounded and think about our own market. Knowing your demographics is very important to know where the job seekers are hiding.

From my research and estimations, ~70% of all AU jobs on Twitter are pointing back to SEEK. Try searching Twitter for jobs and see if I am correct - however they are not the ones feeding the RSS feeds into Twitter? go figure.