Online social media has gone a step further in the way people communicate. Whoever understands the importance of networking would surely understand the importance of social media as a job search tool. Apart from the drawing the attention of companies to your profile, there are dedicated portals to help you build your resume online. There are places for companies to post jobs and job seekers to search jobs.

One of the recruiters once mentioned to me that the first step in the process of hiring is the authenticity of the resume. That problem if not completely resolved is partially taken care of in creating and selling a profile online. There are a number of portals to help job seekers in their search.

There is no denying that social media is great way to communicate with people of similar interest. If you are a Java Programmer and you happen to discuss a particular technology with someone, there are high chances that you will get hired by the same person in the future. When we look for jobs, we try to leverage our personal contacts to get the inside information of the companies. Social Media works on a similar fashion with a little technical assistance.

LinkedIn: This could easily be called a replacement of any job portal. It has all the feature of Job portals from creating a resume to getting recommendations. It has companies registering and posting jobs as well. LinkedIn profiles have started to work as a link to resume in many places now. I know people who visit the candidates LinkedIn profile before calling them for interview.

If you are looking for job and you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, your resume is certainly not complete.

Twitter: If you haven’t heard about Twitter, you certainly have been missing out on news lately. Twitter has jobs posted all the time and you will always find people posting their availability. It’s a great place to get references as well.

If you are looking for job and are not on Twitter, make sure you know people who are. If you will miss out on an opportunity, at least there will be people to inform you about a post.

Facebook: Most of the companies have their presence on Facebook and are on a lookout for new employees here. There are many job portals also present who send you regular news feed. It helps to join relevant groups in Facebook to get in touch with the right people.

There are several applications available in Facebook to help you with your job search. Click here to find few of these applications.

Apart from taking help from these sites, it also helps to start a blog on the career related topic. A positive web presence is sure to give you an edge over other candidates and also help companies decide better since they already have a lot of information about you before even meeting you.

This owl even resembles one of the akward cartoon show in POGO Channel :D.

To be honest, I have experienced this suspension, myself. Somehow Twitter had banned my account for no reason but they soon brought me back to life. Its was like coming back to life. Since then, I have seen many anomalies in my friends list, like following the people you have already followed, or not being able to follow certain people. Don’t know the reason yet. But I have been watching my friend list seriously, like downloading the friend list and analyzing their status and unfollowing or locking them when found guilty, of being either a suspended user or a user in coma (user who has no status at all but have large following and followers ratio).

So what do you do of these dead users - bury them in dignified way, appeal to bring them back to life, ignore their existence at all. What can be done? I find it difficult to have them in my account as friends, as they makes no sense to my network, who knows when they will come back, I can’t wait forever.

So why are accounts suspended? Let’s look what Twitter had to say about it:

Account suspension occurs when an account is flagged for suspicious activity. One or more of these things may cause an account to be suspended:
• Terms of Service Violations
• Technical Abuse
• Spam Investigation .. read more

You must also check out these rules of twitter: Rules and Regulations and also Terms of use .

Well those were my concerns. If you think you have the solution or ideas on how you are managing your followers list and friends list. Do send some recommendations, it would be very helpful. Further, if there is anything I have missed, do add.

Last week following a news coverage from BBC, and reports from AC Nielson and Compete.com, there were voice concerning the growth of Twitter. They all had concluded early exit of Twitter users and the lowering down of its use.

Alexa tells a very different story; all those reports had claimed the fall of Twitter while the rise of MySpace and FAcebook. The above picture says the bounce rate is highest for Twitter and lowest for Facebook. Orkut and Myspace comes second and third. Facebook is big, and is leading in the visits and users; but lower bounce rate might hurt in long term.

There is a InRev Twitter Usage report, which says the same thing. It has only concluded the rise of Twitter against its competitors.

Go on Twitter, reach the Top!! We are with you.

If you like this article, follow me at @leplan.

Remember, I am only about to talk from the perspective of product marketer only, this way there is less confusion.

The first thing is to know is your fundamental goal and its relation to the people in your network:

1. Are you selling your product to the people on your network?
2. Are the people in your network already utilizing your service or product?

Both may sound similar question but are quite different in the context. And handling both questions requires different approach in the social network.

When you are selling or launching new products, you really have to be at the edge of your seat and track down each tweet made by the people. But when you are analyzing the user response to your products, you have to listen to the tweets related to your company or products. This is some hard and manual work. But from this you will know exactly know what kinds of tweets are going to drive those mass into your sites. It’s not some SEO that I am suggesting. It’s what you can hear these days as Social Media Optimization.

The post will mainly deal with ways of measuring your networks. Some of the parameters which will allow you to analyze tweets are:

1. Tweets per week.
2. Tweets with link.
3. Tweets without link.
4. Number of redundant tweets.
5. Number of replies made by the user.
6. Number of Retweets made on the tweets.

Lets discuss few parameters:

1. Tweets per week will allow you to analyze the energy of your network. Staying in a dead network is the last thing you want to do, if u are marketing. Also, staying in a highly energetic network is going to dissolve your tweets in to the mass. Hence an optimization is required which can be done through proper decision management.

The above graph shows the activity of 3326 people in one random network. You can see that there are 2 people withmaximum tweets identify such tweets and configure their usefulness. It’s important to understand the characteristicsof tweets frequency and its nature to the people.

2. Tweets with links and tweets without linksAdding a link to the tweets is one of the major components of the twitter marketing. Therefore, knowing the distribution of the number to tweets with and without link is going to describe your network much better.

The above chart shows a relation-ship between the numbers of tweets with the number of RTs done for those tweets.

In this network you can find that there is an individual whose tweets has not been retweeted but has maximum tweets links. What do you make of it?I would certainly remove such users. The other interesting thing is the profile with maximum RT but less number of tweets, now that is what I consider quality and is the very goal of each marketer – to float the links as many as possible.

The other parameters like number of replies and identifying redundant tweets are important factor to know your network much better.

The process and the system for these kinds of analysis are new. The reason is that for the first time we are able to collect large amount of data regarding the consumer’s behavior.Online social network has opened a new domain of analysis. The fact and the points being mentioned are only the tip of the ice-berg. With more enhanced analysis on the matter, soon we can have a collection of useful metrics that can clearly identify the needs of market researcher or any other professional to help them understand what consumer want.

BBC has written an article on the loss of Twitter Charm based on a research by Harvard Folks. It says 10% of users generate 90% of the traffic; if this is true it is really an alarming situation.
InRev Analysis Team carried a quick research on 3276 random Tweeters and this is what we have found.

Myths and the analysis findings

1. Most Tweeters Tweet only Once
Out of the sample of 3076 random tweeters, only 242 Tweeters are found to Tweet only once. That constitute for 7% of the portfolio. This 7% also includes people who used Tweeter more frequently in earlier weeks, and could find time for only one Tweet for the week considered.

2. People just throw feeds in Twitter
If the analysis is something to go by, feed does not seem to dominate the Tweet flow. Out of total 169k tweets by the sampled Tweeters, 93% (151k) Tweets are non-feeds. The feeds constitute dismal 7% of the stream. The manual Tweets actually make up most of the Tweet stream.

3. Twitter has useless daily life talks
If we consider the link Tweets as Signal and no-Link Tweets as Noise, overall Twitter has a signal to noise ratio of 47%; meaning for every 100 no-link Tweets, people tweet 47 link tweets.When I consider my Facebook friends, signal to noise ratio in Facebook is significantly lower. Most of them post the Facebook application test updates and general life details.

4. Most people are inactive in Twitter

The above table shows the Tweet frequency behaviour of the individuals. On an average one person Tweets 7 times in a day. This might be lower for the Social Media Analyst or a Marketer, but for a portfolio of all area professionals, the number is not less.

5. Twitter is slowing down, loses the charm
Recent article on venture beat mentioning the loss of Twitter got our attention. It has mentioned two researches by AC Nielson and Compete.com, and those have shown the downfall of the Micro-blogging site to the likes of Facebook and Myspace.

Our research says, the visitors to the Twitter site might be static or falling down, but the reason is not loss to Facebook or MySpace. Instead its due to the Twitter API based Clients.
The result is possible, as compete.com findings are based on Twitter Website use and not on overall Service use. No idea what went wrong with AC Nielson. One possible thing could be biased data sample by us or by them.
If we consider compete.com statistics and add the Twitter client usage, it certainly has edge over Facebook and MySpace. Basically 36% of Twitter use is competing with over 90% of MySpace and Facebook use (assuming 90% of Facebook and MySpace use is through their Website).

Here are the analysis observations and suggestions:
1. Twitter is growing, and growing fast. But the use of Twitter Website is decreasing; Twitter may need to work on bettering the user interface.
2. Twitter Clients are taking away the traffic from Twitter, but they add huge value to the Company. They make Twitter better to use over rivals Facebook and MySpace. The aggressive openness to external use of APIs has actually worked well.
3. Twitter might need to consider partnership with the API based Application builders, and promote them to bring more value to customers and the partners, keeping Twitter’s interest intact.
4. Social Media Marketers need to keep the focus intact with Twitter. It is certainly the big thing now, and can only become bigger thing in days ahead.

About the Research

Analysis done based on random 3276 accounts. The general statistics of the portfolio studied are:
1. Total Tweeters : 3276
2. Max. no of followers : 983k
3. Min. no. of followers : 9
4. Average no. Of followers : 8.4k
5. Total no. Of followers : 2.78m
6. Maximum no. Of Tweets per week : 3016 (one week)
7. Minimum no. Of Tweets per week : 1 (per week)

So the point is - Twitter is one platform which can be used in many different ways, people jsut need to figure out how to do it. There is no one way of using twitter, there are man ways. People have high expectations and they are readily disappointied when things don’t go their way.   My say is don’t be disappointed, if you have nothing to say in Twitter, just keep listening - like a radio. Well if you are confused on how you should make your stay in Twitter useful - read this. There is no harm in it. So don’t leave so soon, take your time. And yes, Twitter must create more awareness on how Twitter can be used.

Now let us quickly think about the possible reasons. Well it could be because most net savvy people in US and UK already know about Facebook and are using it; Chinese and Japanese don’t care about it. And Indians like it and are happy with Orkut.

Any other reasons you have in mind? Do share.

I had started using twitter three months back. The power of 140 words soon got me hooked to the site and I was completely bowled over by what twitter could do to one’s business. Primarily, one can tweet, follow people, get followed back, and get tweeted back. Different people use twitter differently though the process remains the same for all. Twitter can be used as an expression of your mood, you could chose to give updates or tell your friends your feeling. It could be used to know about a certain topic or seek help from experts. You could know about the market or share your thoughts with others.

Few points about Twitter:
• It is a social networking and micro-blogging site.
• It is real-time problem solving engine.
• It is real-time answer engine.

The question that still remains unanswered: “What exactly is twitter?”. According to twitter, “Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices”.

Initially, Twitter came across as a social networking portal. Thanks to the short messages and instant networking features, Twitter gained popularity in no time. People started using this to post their thoughts and get the optimum return. Its viral effect made it as real time problem solving engine and real time answer engine. Next thing expected from a search engine was to get results involving the people and Twitter provided that. Wow!!! The search facility that Twitter provided and the interface, according to me is competitive to Google.

I believe that Twitter is more than just a Social networking and micro blogging site. What I like most about Twitter is its real-time answer engine and human driven search engine unlike its contemporaries which don’t have human involvement. Twitter has had a phenomenal success in the past few months and it surely is here to stay.

TC has done a detailed analysis here http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pSnKg7M-DPfdEvcCrNoiETA

I agree in principle that the value of a social network comes down to monetizing its users and ad seems the plausible way today.

Hanging around Facebook and Facebook economy of developers a lot and my recent foray into Bebo, I see two main points missing:

1. Social Ads or monetizing users based on their social endorsement is being experimented by Facebook and is in infancy. That promise is the basis of its valuation and not standard ads alone.

2.  Even if we were to look at regular ads only, I as a user on facebook am more valuable to facebook than a new user who has a profile with 2 apps and 1 wall post. The page views a user produces by their activity level is important. So any measurement to find the percentage of engaged users for each platform will provide more realistic numbers on their revenue potential and valuation.

So based on this I would conclude Bebo’s valuation should be much higher than the $850Mil AOL paid for it.

I attended the Keynotes, visited the Expo and Web2Open sessions on thurs and friday.

Web2.0 being the Social Web seems an accepted notion among everyone now. All focus was on how to build out real social web beyond the social networks.

Many announcements focused on opening developer APIs to create platforms. I personally think this is going to be the future in the coming year to create interoperable sites with exchange of data across the platforms.

Y! and AOL had announcements about opening up as a platform. AIM is now the most open platform on the Web now! If you are a developer anywhere in the world, you have to check it out!

Mitchel Baker of Mozilla Foundation spoke eloquontly about opening Firefox as a platform for mobile social.

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was soooo funny but had nuggets of wisdom we cannot miss.