The other approach is probably best described by legendary venture capitalist and Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. He believes, and I agree, that you want to view Twitter as one of the greatest mass communication tools ever. Guy, with 180,000 followers, says that you shouldn't even try to use it for two way communications. Tools like Facebook and even email or "real" conversations are better suited for that. If you have 10,000 followers and only 10 percent care about what you tweet (post), that's still 1,000 people who are listening. Isn't that better than having only dozens or a few hundred followers even if all are listening? Also, the reality of Twitter is that very, very few people read or care about all of the tweets posted by anyone. People sample. They read a few here and they read a few there. To believe that anyone is going to read and care about all of your tweets is pretty unrealistic.

If you agree with Guy's approach then the goal is to maximize the number of your followers because inevitably a decent percentage of those will care about what you tweet and they'll pass your messages along to their network (re-tweet your posts) and when they do that, the magic starts to happen. Re-tweets mean that your messages are important and you gain followers very quickly with re-tweets. At least as importantly, search engines like Google look at the links posted in the tweets and re-tweets but understandably value those in the re-tweets more because they're not self-serving. And if you get someone like Guy re-tweeting your posts, those are more important in the eyes of Google than someone like me re-tweeting your posts because Guy has more followers and so what he tweets is therefore more likely to be relevant to more people and Google search results are all about relevancy.

CollegeRecruiter.com has two official Twitter accounts. Some of our employees have their own, personal Twitter accounts and some of them post CollegeRecruiter.com information to those accounts and we're fine with that, but the two official accounts are Twitter.com/EntryLevelJob and Twitter.com/StevenRothberg. The EntryLevelJob account is used largely to promote a sampling of the newest job postings, blogs, articles, press releases, and other content from our site. The StevenRothberg account has some of that, but I also personally post a sampling of articles from other sites that I feel have particular merit and should be of interest to my followers. As of the writing of this blog article, the EntryLevelJob account has almost 15,000 followers and the StevenRothberg account has almost 8,500 followers, so together we're able to reach almost 23,500 people multiple times a day by automatically and sometimes manually posting links to various content items. A small but significant percentage of those content items are clicked on, which generates about five percent of the traffic to our site, and a small but significant percentage of the content items are re-tweeted by some of our followers, which gets us some serious love from Google.

We got serious about Twitter last winter and in the spring we started to really focus on it. We increased our followers from a couple of thousand to the 23,500 followers in just a few months. How? By following others, particularly those whose profiles indicate that they have similar interests to ours. You see, we aren't just out to maximize the number of followers. We're out to maximize the number of relevant followers. We're happy to have anyone following us, but if we're going to spend time and/or money on attracting new followers -- and we do -- we'd rather spend that on people who will actually care and therefore will be likely to click through to our site and re-tweet some of what we write. Ready for some serious transparency? Here are some snapshots from today's weekly report for the EntryLevelJob account. You're seeing what I see each week when I check-in to monitor how many people we're following, how many people are following us, who is following us, etc. Bon appetit!