Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

There is some business value in social media but for most large corporations, it seems to be more of a distraction than anything else. Twitter.com (www.twitter.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) are the two big social sites at the moment now that the MySpace (www.myspace.com) craze has died down.

In a recent Best Buy job posting, Best Buy put a requirement in it to have a Twitter account with 250 followers. Chances are if you have a Twitter account and 250 followers, you’ve been on Twitter for a while and have something to say that people might be interested in. On the other hand, some percentage of the Twitterverse is just a bunch of bots with fake pictures that scan user messages (Tweets) and follow them in the hope that they’ll be followed back and be able to hawk MLM, weight loss, penis pills, porn or something else. Many times, however, if you get followed right back it is just another bot on the other end.

Companies might do well to see if people are knowledgable in social media but requirements for a set number of followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook seems a bit odd.

Simply by posting nonsense messages on Twitter about weight loss, work at home, MLM and other high spam areas you can build up a worthless profile with lots of bots following you that will fulfill the requirements laid on out the job but be meaningless and absolutely useless.

People who really understand these types of things are the ones companies like BestBuy should be hiring especially if they don’t yet have anyone there who does.

The other question it begs is WHY? Why would it matter how many followers a person has on Twitter? The WHY question needs to be asked a lot more in business these days. It seems like 90% of the stuff most businesses do is unnecessary, unneeded and a big waste of time. Welcome to the Internet!

You can go follow BestBuy on Twitter.