Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [72]
Be yourself
Like with the individual and business-only accounts, be sure to give your name in your bio. Transparency about who you are and what you do can go a long way toward growing your Twitter foundation. And a good Twitter foundation is key to establishing a stable and growing Twitter network. Using your real name adds to your value as an individual.
Just as in other business interactions, you need to be genuine on Twitter and establish yourself as a trustworthy, multidimensional person.
At the same time, think carefully about how much of your private matters you want to share. Occasional mention of your love life, health, and other more personal stuff can be very funny, very humanizing, and very honest, but being really negative, self-indulgent, or tedious about the same will put people off. When you really need to talk about those things, it’s very possible you’ll find supportive people on Twitter. Having found something in common or someone who wants to help, you may even get into a more in-depth conversation with a twitterer via DM or leave Twitter altogether via e-mail, IM, or over your favorite beverage. You can also definitely connect with people on more public personal topics like sports, TV, books, movies, or politics without revealing all your deepest secrets.
As a person on Twitter, you might find value in talking about your business problems in the open. Many fellow twitterers are willing to give you advice about how to overcome a business challenge or situation. If you’ve spent time cultivating a network that works for you, you have many resources at your fingertips. Ask them!
Identifying Your Audience
Whether you’re a business or an individual on Twitter, if you want to grow your Twitter network, it’s helpful to think about your audience. If you haven’t transplanted your existing social networks onto Twitter, it may be a good time to do that and to put a bit of time and effort into expanding your network.
Think about the kinds of people you’d like to talk to or the subjects you’d like to discuss through Twitter. Trying to build up business? Target your customers. Want to communicate with other avid cyclists on Twitter? Search keywords and look to see who tweets about major cycling events. Send updates that are relevant to whomever you’d like to reach or about the topics that interest you and engage yourself in that conversation. Yes, it’s that easy.
When you start using Twitter, it’s pretty hard to determine who your audience will be — your followers grow based on what value you can provide for other users. So, if you’re trying to reach other cyclists to talk about racing, the Tour de France, or the latest in derailleur technology, start talking about it and search for other users already chatting about the subject. (You can find out about searching for users and topics in Chapters 5 and 9.)
You don’t have to be one-dimensional in your Twitter chat — if you want to engage cyclists, you don’t always and only have to talk about cycling. People understand that you have more to you than a single activity or idea (unless you’re a company or targeted Twitter account, for which the implicit rules are a little different — see “Your business on Twitter,” earlier in this chapter), so don’t feel that you need to talk about only one thing to be of value to your target audience. Be yourself and talk about the things you like; but, if you want to engage other cyclists, just talk a bit more about cycling than anything else. That’s all. Over time, your cycling network will grow.
Viewing your network
Although you have little direct control over who follows you, you can easily see what sort of user you’re attracting. Browse through your list of Followers and click through to open some of their profiles to get a general idea of who’s following you (on any Twitter screen, click the Followers link under your name in the sidebar).
When you look into who’s following you, you might realize that you’re drawing unexpected people as followers. Reaching people and businesses you never expected to