Twitter is an immensely powerful network. Compared to Facebook the user base is tiny and even with 175 million registered accounts only a fraction of those are thought to be active. The community might be small compared to other networks but it is easier to reach your target market using Twitter and Twitter users tend to be more passionate, willing to share and converse with others. Anyone who has got an @reply from a celebrity will understand how easy it can be to reach people usually innaccessible to them. So how can you make the most of your Twitter presence? Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing my top tips.
1. Profile picture
There is nothing that makes you look as untrustworthy as the defalt Twitter profile image, people will assume that you don’t tweet or that you aren’t serious about tweeting, a lot of the spam on Twitter comes from a faceless account and as a business this is the last thing you want people to associate you with. But what should the avatar be? For business do you use a photograph of yourself or your logo? To answer this you need to ask yourself a few questions. Are you always going to be the person tweeting for your business? Is your brand based on your persona? How important is your brand identity?
If you are not going to compose every tweet yourself posting a photograph is misleading, even some celebrities have fallen fowl of this, transparancy and trust are important in social media and any doubt of your authenticity can do you more damage than good. If you are your brand including a profile picture of yourself is important, people will recognise you and associate you with the information you share – building trust. Make sure it is a good professional photograph and one that is identifiably you. A great example of this is @KrishnaDe who uses the same profile image on all of her social media channels. It is unmistakably her and you would have no problem identifying her if she walked into a room.
If your brand identity is important to you use your logo on Twitter. I use my logo for Spiderworking.com as I want people to to recognise the brand, I use it consistently in one form or another on all of my social media. I also want to seperate business from pleasure, @spiderworking is all about business, if I want to talk about anything non business related I use my personal account @hamperlady. At the moment I am the only person tweeting for @spiderworking I hope in the future other employees will join the conversation… don’t worry I’ll let you know if and when this happens.
A great example of how this can work is @CuriousWines, as featured last week. They use their logo on their account but both @curiousmatt and @curiousmike use photographs on their personal twitter profiles.
2. Bio
Twitter gives you a 160 character bio to introduce yourself on Twitter, bare in mind that this is one of the things people are going to focus on when they choose whether to follow you or not. Again you need to consider who is going to be tweeting on behalf of the company. Is it just you? Are there two of you or are there multiple tweeters?
If you alone are tweeting for your business or if you share with just one other person try and be as personal as you can in your profile. Of course you should talk about what you do, your business but try and add a bit of personality too. @Umnumnum_cork and @ladyumbrellaltd do this really well.
If you have multiple tweeters for your business using your bio to identify who is who can be a great way to instill confidence in your followers. @Toyota have five people contributing to their account, they use their bio to list each one including their individual twitter accounts and the initials they will use to sign off their tweets.
Next week we’ll be back with part two but in the mean time if you have any words of wisdom to share let us know in the comment box below. I’m still looking for tip number six so I’d appreciate any help you can give!
