It’s intriguing that the ability to write a short status message — a Facebook status, a Twitter update or what have you — is becoming increasingly prized. After all, we can access millions of words of text with just a click of a button.

There are plenty of markets and contests for long-form writing (whether online or offline), but the number of opportunities for extremely short written works seems to be exploding. I’m not just talking about markets for Twitter fiction, either: social networking site GoodReads is running a contest through its status updates. GoodReads members are invited to post stories as their status updates. Although a story can stretch across multiple updates, the contest rules do place an emphasis on brevity.

The Value of Statuses

Just as there are bloggers for hire working for big companies around the world, I do think that at least a few businesses will experiment with bringing in some variety of micro-bloggers for hire. Currently, I think the jury is still out on their value.

Right now, there are certainly some companies on Twitter and other sites offering up a little insight into their day-to-day routines. It’s been a fairly successful approach — but only because it’s authentic. Someone involved in the daily operations of the company is also the one posting the updates.

Status Updates and Social Media Jobs

If they aren’t doing it already, some of the social media boutique marketing firms are probably going to offer to take care of Twitter updates and the like for their customers. That means they’ll be bringing in some hired guns to do the actual writing. Providing a stream of Twitter updates sounds like a nice job. I don’t know that it will be so easy to do for a writer who isn’t entirely involved in a company’s routines, though.

Would you take that job? It’s a writing position, after all. Let me know in the comments.