Twitter - How Many Profiles For You?

Unlike other major social media platforms, Twitter allow you to create multiple personas (profiles) for your personal, business and socially conscious activities.  What is the right number for you?

The most important variable that limits your number of profiles is time.  As indicated elsewhere on the blog, an average business spends considerable time for each profile on any social media platform.  For most, it is about 32 hours per month.

If you have multiple niches that interest you, I recommend that you have more than a single Twitter presence despite the time involved.  Let me share my reasons for this recommendation.

We want to train our followers to look for our tweets, to search out our avatars or usernames, pay attention to what we have to say and follow our recommendations (or, at least investigate and consider them).  That is simply social engagement.

Each of us has multiple interests.  You may be a cat lover who is passionate about increasing the amount of energy derived from wind power.  Your business may be the restoration of old cars.  If you want to tweet frequently about each of those parts of your identity, I suggest that you need three separate profiles.  Here’s why…

You should be an interesting conversationalist.  I know that Twitter asks, “What are you doing now?”  However, think of the question as “What are you doing now that is interesting or stimulating?”  Remember that what is interesting to some of your followers might not be of interest to others.  Consequently, make each of your personas something of a specialist.  In the example, one persona tweets about cats: cat nutrition, cat health, cat rescue organizations, clever things your cat does, etc.  Use a separate profile to tweet about wind energy and yet another for your tweets about car restoration, otherwise you’ll be narrowing your active followers to cat lovers who are passionate about wind energy and older cars.

Do you want two thirds of your followers wondering why you bothered to post any given tweet.  Of course not!  That works counter to our objective of conditioning our followers to actually seeking out what we have to say.

We all wear different hats in life, including our time on Twitter.  Establish a separate Twitter profile for each of those hats…at least for each of those roles we play about which we want to converse 140 characters at a time.

Related articles:

• 5 Free Tools to Spring Clean Your Twitter Account (computerworld.com)
• Mytwebo – get your favorite tweets onto a pdf! (twi5.com)
• Why You Should Have a Secondary Twitter Account (techipedia.com)