Picking up from yesterday – another thing that can be a bit hard for people to find on twitter:
What is your brand?
I have some comedian friends and some of them struggle with this. (And I’m sure non-comedians do too.) “Should my twitter feed be sarcastic?” “Should it revolve around this or that side of my personality, or this or that big life event?”
If you’re a performer, do you just have tweets that have to do with performing – or how personal do you get?
I even kind of tried my hand at having a “personal” twitter. (That’s in quotes because obviously, my blog is personal. But it’s kind of, sort of a brand-ish… and what if I want to just be me? What if I don’t have a blog someday?)
Well, that experiment was a huge mess. I had no idea who I wanted to be or what I wanted to talk about on that twitter account.
I tried to maybe be a bit more, um, I guess sarcastic is the word version of myself – or, you know, that sad funny that (a tweeter I really enjoy) @AndyLassner is. But I certainly never found my real “twitter voice” (if that’s a thing).
I mean, I guess not everybody has to be sarcastic and/or hilarious on twitter. There are plenty of feeds I like that aren’t like that (not to say Neil’s doesn’t have some funny tweets, but I don’t think that’s what his feed is known for), though there are plenty great feeds that are.
Brands aside, there are some other things people might not get totally right when they first start twitter. It sort of has a bit of a learning curve. When I went back through my feed the other day to check it out and walk down twitter memory lane, I saw a tweet to Michael Bloomberg, showing him my support for keeping the New York City Marathon on (though, in the end that didn’t happen), and I didn’t even put a period in front of his name!
“Silly girl,” I said about myself as I shook my head at the computer.
I didn’t know back then that in order for someone else to see a tweet about someone, there has to be a period (or anything) in front of the name for everyone to see it (not only the people who follow both you and the person you’re tweeting).
I don’t love looking back and seeing those early twitter mistakes. But, twitter is twitter. Not much I can do about it now, except know that anyone who looks back will know I used to be a total twitter newb. (But weren’t we all at some point? Or you all knew the period thing before me, didn’t you?)
One thing that sometimes throws people off on twitter is the timing. Some people write articles that say if you have an important tweet, you should tweet it at different times of the day when different people will be on twitter, so that hopefully the majority of your followers can see the tweet.
But, I get a little annoyed if a place tweets out the same news story 7 or 8 times in the course of a couple days. ‘Cause for those of us who are seeing it over and over, it just feels so bleh in our feed so many times.
But what’s the balance of annoying the loyal followers, but reaching as many as possible? I dunno.
And I will pick up with one more post in this series tomorrow.