The most important way to look at twitter is as a multi-way conversation, not one way. I recently decided to “up my game” on twitter and start using it properly and found that my interactions went up 200% and my followers up 50%. One thing to remember though is that follower’s isn’t everything, the most important aspect of twitter is creating content which delivers value, whether it be in the form of your passion, knowledge, opinion or personality. So here are some tips on making your own brand on twitter.
- Identify your style. What do you like to see on twitter and what do you post. You can express this in your description of your profile, it helps those know what to expect but it’s mainly just what you tweet about for me it’s business, sports and personal tweets. Personal tweets help get your personality across and encourage engagement.
- Follow. On twitter you can follow anyone, it doesn’t matter if you know them or not. Follow the type of people or twitter accounts that interest you, whether it’s sports teams, celebrities, news outlets, business reporters, bloggers or individuals. To get started you need to follow people so check out the “who to follow” section on twitter and follow anyone you think are mildly interesting at first, if they don’t post content that appeals to you then you can easily unfollow later.
- Interact with the people. Reply and retweet tweets you find interesting; it helps people find you who also have an interest in the content that they follow from the person you’re interacting with.
- Hashtag. If you’re joining in on a conversation, make sure you use the right hashtag but don’t always go too overboard with them if you want to be taken seriously.
- Be creative. Whether it is an article, video, picture, fact, theory or observation, make your tweets creative and interesting and people will engage with you. My best one was photo shopping a tweet from Natalie Tran the popular YouTuber:
[embed]https://twitter.com/ChrisGordon_8/status/508520422451589120[/embed]
Finally, Twitter is a massive community and people will try and get follows for follows or you may lose some followers after you tweet about a topic that wasn't the topic they followed you for. Don’t worry about it; they will just miss the good content you post. The end goal for twitter if you’re trying to brand yourself is to create or join in on conversations and bring value with what you’re saying, whether it’s professional, personal, opinionated or humour, just be yourself.