Twitter is a great tool and provides many ways to impact, manage and build equity for your personal brand. In this blog post we will look at 36-tips for personal branding on Twitter.
1. Make your Blog Social – Integrate a Twitter widget into your blog to give it wings. (Example: @careerrocketeer)
2. Custom Background Image – Integrate a visual image in the background that reinforces your personal brand and connects with your blog. (Example: @ChrisBrogan)
3. Polish your Avatar – Integrate a professional looking avatar that is consist across all your social networks that visually looks like you so that people can associate with you.
4. Strategic Social URLs – Choose your Twitter handle wisely. Choose a name that you are strategically planning to build brand equity with.
5. Be a Trust Builder – Twitter is more than a channel where you build a large number of followers. You are really building trust with the people who follow you.
6. Character 2.0 – Your tweets are a character stream that people can validate.
7. Think before you Tweet – All tweets are now archived forever by Library of Congress (LOC), all tweets from March 2006 going forward. http://bit.ly/dq5Wws
8. Profile Bio – Your Twitter profile should identify who and what you are (Example: @KellyLux)
9. Re-Tweetable Bio – Create a bio that is re-tweetable with 120 characters.
10. Create Touch Points – Each tweet is a potential touch point with a potential employer, business partner, customer or strategic partner so handle them with care.
11. Integrate into your web 1.0 Content – Integrate into your business cards other marketing literature.
12. Own Mindshare – Own Digital Real Estate: tweets, @replies and mentions allow you to position yourself in the mind of your target audience.
13. ROI (Return on Identity) - Over time you are creating return on identity so make sure you are re-enforcing the identity you desire.
14. Become a Sound Bite King – Tweeting forces you to think in little commercials (or sound bites)
15. Own a hashtag - A hashtag is a community of people. Owning the hashtag is a commitment to purposeful content on a selected topic. (For example: #journchat is the hashtag for the Twitter Chat founded by @PRSarahEvans which is an ongoing conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR folks.)
16. Be Focused – The focus or goals of Twitter account must be determined. Are you a personal or branded account (For example: @HajjFlemings vs. @BrandCampU .)
17. Biz Development/Lead Generator – Think about how you can create monteizable biz opportunities.
18. Searchable/Query – Query content and keywords that are relevant to your niche it will foster greater interaction with people in the space you are focused on.
19. Broadcast your Blog Post – Great way to syndicate your blog post to your community (Example: @problogger)
20. Blog Post Titles – It forces you to think about tweetable blog post titles. Integrating Twitter handles and titles that people will want to share. (Example: @thisissethsblog)
21. Master 120 – If your tweets are longer than 120 characters you are grounded your tweets and eliminating the more value aspect of tweeting the re-tweet.
22. Twitter List Barometer – Use it as a barometer of how your network views you. If you want your network to view you as a PR Specialist but you are only on underwater basket weaving list then you need to re-evaluate the content you tweet.
23. Attend Tweet-up – As you began to attend tweet-up it is your badge and your ID that is used to communicate. Connect with likeminded people.
24. Track Content – Use Bit.ly or Hootsuite to track to identify quality metric data.
25. Set-up Groups/List to Focus on Content from specific users.
26. Meet People in New Markets – When I travel I use Twitter as a tool to meet users/influencers in new markets using tools like WeFollow.com
27. Pay attention – Listening is critical respond to your @replies and mentions build reputation as being attentive and responsive.
28. Become a Case Study – Melinda Emerson (@smallbizlady) – She developed a strategy 20-months prior to being on Twitter. The end result is that she has used Twitter to develop a platform for people to connect with her on her book ‘Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months’. She realized that 60% of people who buy books buy it from someone they have had contact with.
29. Become Geo Loc Enabled – Geo location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are great at events like SXSW it helps you to connect with people that you want to network with.
30. Crowdsourcing – Your network is a diverse, geographically disperse community and is a prime target to crowdsource ideas to get quality recommendations and leads.
31. Mobilize – The use of smartphone third party apps allow you to be responsive and connect in real-time on opportunities you don’t the time to get in front of a desktop computer for.
32. Online/Offline – Focus on turning your online Twitter friends into offline interaction.
33. Don’t Argue – Don’t try to prove to someone you are smarter than them by arguing back and forth in a stream of tweets to prove your mental superiority. This will not add value to your brand. (This was birthed out of a tweet exchange between @claudinerenee and myself about Butler University. She responded to one of my tweets in which she had more information than me so we continued our conversation offline. I wanted to understand her position without filling my Twitter stream with our discussion. I walked away more informed.)
34. Online Reputation Management – Use Google alerts, Keyword searches and third party apps to manage and monitor your Twitter reputation.
35. Account Managers – Be careful who manages your account. Giving a third party access to your account could cause your account to be suspended, lose your account name or to destroy our reputation by tweeting something that is beyond repair.
36. Tom Peters & Seth Godin Rule – It is not about the numbers. As of 06/30/10 together Seth and Tom have 17,303 followers (Seth Godin-5 & Tom Peters-17,298) but they have more influence, a higher quality of life and they make more than most people with over 100,000 followers.
