About six hours ago I used twitter to announce the availability of a paid internship opportunity, being offered through the Channel 4 Diversity Production Scheme, here at Headshift. It's one of a number of internships made available through the scheme.

My tweet, a short message of under 140 characters, was instantly visible to my 1175 followers on the service. But the impact of my tweet was magnified many times by fourteen people, some of them colleagues, others people I know and some I've never met, retweeting my post - to their 5297 followers. Two other people tweeted in response without the link, and I received several inquiries directly, as a result.

Forgetting for a moment that I haven't adjusted for overlapping followers, and there will be many, my tweet and the subsequent retweets have reached as many as 6474 twitter users.

Is twitter alone the future of recruitment advertising? Well, probably not, but it can certainly help spread the word widely, to the right audience, and very quickly without much, if any, additional effort.

[update: By 9am the next morning, a further 1060 followers have, potentially, seen the retweeted message, bringing the total to 7534. Further, @glambert tweeted a link to this blog post - he's got 2374 followers alone.]