Is Twitter A Good Tool For Your Personal Brand?
As you continually work to improve your personal brand, you are going to consider many social media tools to utilize. Along this journey, I am sure that Twitter will be one of them. The reason that Twitter is such a good outlet for you is that Twitter is a means to express both your professional and personal sides. The professional and personal mixture, of course, being your own unique personal brand.
The problem begins when your personal brand sways more heavily one way over the other. This is most concerning when the personal emphasis is the heavier of the two.
As Mack Collier tweeted, “Getting on Twitter is NOT a strategy, Twitter is a tactic to execute a social media strategy”. Such a wise statement.
Twitter is a tool for you to continually work to create and expand upon your personal brand. Any social networking tool is not a strategy, but instead is a tool (and this cannot be forgotten). Twitter is searchable by Bing and now by Google which further exposes you and your personal branding message.
Let’s take an example for a moment. Pretend Katy is an SEO “expert” and she is working to position her personal brand firmly in the SEO field. Katy wants to be more easily found so she signs up for Twitter. Katy starts to tweet so that she may spread insight and connect with others on SEO tactics and strategy. However, over time, she lets her personality enter more and more. Katy begins to tweet on non-SEO topics and engage in conversations outside of her personal brand and on non-business related subjects. Katy continues to tweet but the focus is now closer to a 50/50 split on SEO related material versus non-business subjects.
There are two opposing tactics at play in this example.
- Katy’s personality is coming through, which is not necessarily a bad thing to happen. This allows her followers to better know her and be able to engage with her on a variety of topics. However, by taking her message further away from the SEO space, Katy’s personal brand begins to falter in terms of having a consistent message.
- Because Katy’s tweets are not as consistent as when she started, then the results that appear in a Bing or Google search will not necessarily produce the SEO-based results that she desires. By keeping SEO as the major theme and sprinkling other topics in on an as needed basis, Katy will continue to increase her personal brand in the SEO space and potentially position her as a leader in the field.As with any personal brand message and social media strategy, you must have a clear picture as to what you would like to convey as your personal brand as well as the selected tools to help create your brand. This means working to communicate a clear and consistent message of you.
So, to answer the question: “is Twitter a good tool for your personal brand?” Yes it is a valuable tool. However, it is only a good tool if you use it in a manner that supports your personal brand and does not dilute the message you are working to communicate.
Make a Twitter plan and execute the strategy. Your personal brand relies on it!
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Very well said. Strongly concur. Lead with your value and not your personal life.
Online content is king and pretty much the only way to interact with anyone. If you don't deliver value then no one will care as you are not special. Social Media is about the connections you make and how you help other people. If there is no value, there is no connection.
I am having trouble deciding on this topic. I recently was talking to a client and he asked, “Why do you write so many personal tweets? I really like a lot of the links you share, but it's annoying to have to read all these replies to people I don't know.”
On one hand, I want to share my personality – on the other, I want to be relevant and professional. To me, two accounts is extra work and not the answer. How do I accomplish that then?
That's a very interesting situation. It's great that they enjoy your relevant and interesting tweets that you share but the whole point of twitter is the easy communication. It seems like they might actually be using twitter.com to check your tweets which would cause this inconvenience for them. I would recommend trying to set them up with tweetdeck or another platform so that they can customize how they view their tweets.
Overall if only one client is complaining I would continue to @ other twitter users as you need to interact and create conversation. You need to share your personality with your community so that you don't seem like a robot.
That's a very interesting situation. It's great that they enjoy your relevant and interesting tweets that you share but the whole point of twitter is the easy communication. It seems like they might actually be using twitter.com to check your tweets which would cause this inconvenience for them. I would recommend trying to set them up with tweetdeck or another platform so that they can customize how they view their tweets.
Overall if only one client is complaining I would continue to @ other twitter users as you need to interact and create conversation. You need to share your personality with your community so that you don't seem like a robot.