The Exploding Twitter Job Market

While Twitter seems a bit like the Wild West these days with lots of unknowns and rumors of potential riches, it may hold promise for people in unexpected ways: new jobs. With around 13 million current users (and a projected billion, as predicted by the unauthorized leaking of proprietary Twitter corporate documents), Twitter promises free access to a market ripe for a constant stream of new, value-added information on a minute-by-minute basis — that we know. 

“It’s a well known fact that affiliate marketers and people in direct marketing are using Twitter to leverage traffic and make sales,” says vice president of DaVinci Institute, Deb Frey, who specializes in nontraditional marketing.

What we didn’t expect was that heightened traffic and sales would bring a proliferation of job titles and opportunities that have never existed before, a significant development especially when you compare job creation – currently a White House priority — in social media with the job destruction in other industries, like GM’s 50,000 jobs lost. On Indeed.com, a job aggregator, there are more than 7,000 jobs currently posted with the words “social media” in the description and more than 1,000 of them pay at least $110,000 per year.

Major global brands like Coke and Pepsi now have directors of social media, six-figure jobs centered on watching who is saying what about their brands, and leveraging that information for research, new product ideas and heightened customer service. Mid-tier companies are also hiring VPs and directors, as well as in-the-trenches Twitter “Watchers.”

“Some companies like Dell and Comcast have people watching for keywords like ‘Comcast’ or ‘Dell’, and reply to those tweets,” says Frey. “They manage their online reputation in this manner.” 

For example, during Comcast outages, customers who voice concern, complaints or questions are responded with a personal message from @comcastcares within minutes. The greater the traffic, the larger the team will need to be to handle the service flow, as well as the information gathering opportunities.