Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [76]
Whether you’re a business or a private citizen, your followers and potential followers react much more favorably if you include in your Twitter profile a photo of yourself and a link to something about you. People like to know who they’re talking to, and when you present an image that reflects who you are, other people become willing to be honest and open with you.
If you’re representing a large, iconic brand on Twitter, you can do your Twitter profile in your corporate colors. However, because Twitter’s strength is in personal connections, you need to have actual people representing your brand’s Twitter presence. Use a service such as CoTweet (http://cotweet.com), shown in Figure 10-6, to mark each tweet with its author, and in the 160-character bio on Twitter.com, let readers know who each set of initials belongs to.
Too many team members to list? You can show them off in your background graphic the way @CoTweet itself does. (Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Laura is an adviser for @CoTweet.) Check out Chapter 11 for more recommendations on the best ways for businesses to tweet.
Figure 10-6: You can “sign” Tweets by author by using CoTweet.
Being genuine
Authentic people and businesses, using Twitter in a real and interactive way, can experience tremendous growth and return on investment from Twitter because they make real contributions and build up a rich base of trust, influence, and social capital. People respond much better to an authentic, human voice. They engage more closely because they feel comfortable responding, retweeting, and otherwise paying attention to the genuine voice. Bring some value to the twitterverse by adding your authentic contributions, whatever those may be.
For example, if you’re tweeting about politics, whether you’re a conservative, moderate, liberal, apathetic, or whatever, feel free to agree or disagree with someone — Twitter is, after all, a digital extension of real life, so if you want to engage in that type of dialog, be yourself. Don’t try to come off as something you’re not just to appeal to people.
If you’re representing a business or tweeting on behalf of your company, you probably want to avoid politics, religion, sex, and other hot-button topics, so as not to offend your potential customers.
Your update stream speaks volumes about you. Twitter is a network built on trust and relationships, and being insincere jeopardizes the quality and effectiveness of your network, both on- and offline. You lose some of that hard-won trust that you’ve been building since you joined Twitter.
Even though you want to be genuine and real at all times, remember that you can easily forget to be nice to people behind the safety of a monitor and keyboard thousands of miles away. Treat others with respect, as you hope to be treated, and you can have a positive online experience. Try not to engage in arguments over petty things — this behavior gets you branded as a troll, and people start to avoid you and stop taking you seriously. (Get the scoop on trolls in the sidebar “Don’t feed the trolls,” in this chapter.)
Evangelizing your causes
When you’re on Twitter as an individual, if you share a favorite cause or a local event in a way that makes it interesting to others, you’ll attract those with common interests. They may get involved and show support, and the more fellow twitterers know about you and about the things you have in common, the more connections and ideas will flow in your network.
Don’t feed the trolls
In Internet parlance, a troll is someone who intentionally posts messages to upset people — for example, making rude and insulting comments on someone’s blog or replying to someone’s tweets with personal attacks.
Because so many conversations happen so quickly on Twitter, sometimes about touchy subjects, users need to