A ‘picture’ is worth a 140 characters

{ 10/30/2011 @ 4:44 pm } · { Creativity, Effectiveness, Recruitment, Social Media, Social recruiting, Uncategorized }
{ Tags: Advertising, Creativity, Recruitment, Social Recruiting, Twitter }

Twitter’s for words. 140 characters to say something with. Something relevant, intriguing, perhaps even witty. That’s all you can do, right? No. Ever heard of ASCII art?

(Prepare for a Geek speak paragraph.)

ASCII art is a technique that consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII).

(Phew. Normal service is now resumed.)

So now imagine what you could do to attract the attention of the average student. They use the online space at pace. What makes them stop and react on Twitter? How about a ‘picture’, perhaps. But no ordinary one though. One created ASCII-stylee. The reason? To create impact – with the audience. To be noticed – as widely as possible, thank you Mr ReTweet. And above all to create a response.

The above OMG generated over 400 click-thrus. And together with another four ASCII tweets, this ‘mini-campaign’ produced almost half the click-thrus in our social recruiting campaign.

Now do you remember that last *new vacancy* or ‘Now Hiring’ tweet you saw…