Five Ways To Leverage Twitter To Build Your Personal Brand

Twitter is huge these days and all the talk about it can quickly become tiring especially the chatter from so called ‘social media experts’ (whatever the hell one of those is anyway) But despite what you may be thinking Twitter is probably the ultimate tool to leverage your personal brand. So stop tweeting what you had for breakfast and read these five points to make Twitter work for your brand.

1. Link to Your Blog

In contrast to what some have been saying recently (especially the social media experts) the blog is not dead. Far from it in-fact, it is your home on the web and the place where you can publish more long form content, that allows the reader/viewer to engage with you. What other web tool could I use to publish stuff like this article and would my twitter followers really be happy to have an ad like the one on the right for my company in their twitter feed? I think not.

It’s important to remember Twitter should compliment your blog, posting links to your blog articles to attract your followers is the perfect use. Some tips for this would be to always shorten the URL to make the tweet seem like less obvious self promotion, along with the fact that long URL’s make your tweets ugly and unreadable. I recommend using bit.ly as their links contain statistics so you can see just how many of your followers are clicking your links.

Oh and remember don’t over do it, nobody wants to follow someone who’s constantly plugging themselves, it’s like getting spam and your follower numbers will fall accordingly.

2. Link to Everyone-else’s Blog

Self promotion is great but don’t expect others to think this, they’re not going to follow a stream of links about you, it’s like having to sit with the person at the party who can’t talk about anything else other than themselves, a little annoying after a while. Drop in links that interest you, generally they are the sort of thing you would have blogged about anyway.

Think that your followers are following you for your taste, your finding them interesting things on the internet to save them time or just to help them out. They must have similar taste to you as they’re interested in seeing what your interested in, so post links to lots of the sites you read regularly and anything else however obscure it is, if you like it put it out there.

3. Real Time Search

Probably the most powerful Twitter feature, search. 100% real time, find out what the world is saying as they say it. It’s like having a huge market to survey for free. If your an accountant why not search accountant (not rocket science is it) and see what people are saying about accounting. Even more valuable is searching you company name and see if people are talking about you or to search a term your interested in, like in my case cycling and start a conversation with people who’ve tweeted out something about your chosen term. You can even search by location to see what people in your area are saying, you might find some interesting connections.

Search is the perfect way to find other people who are into the same thing as you so follow them and get in touch, why wait for them to find you?

4. Conversation – Make it Personal

Make use of the @ key on your keyboard. It’s going to get some serious abuse if you really want to make use of Twitter. If you see a question its easy to send an @ reply back with an answer, if your right you’ll almost defiantly earn yourself another follower. Similarly if you have a question or just fancy a chat or want to voice an opinion aim it at someone, this way it shows up in two places (the main feed and the users @ reply feed) and your starting up the conversation.

Like I said above, don’t tweet about what you had for breakfast (unless it was amazing) but don’t let that stop you tweeting something a little random from time to time. If you see something strange, tweet it. If you feel like it say what your up to today but keep it positive! All this just reminds your followers your human too, it injects some of your personality which is vital to building your personal brand. Be yourself and let it flow.

5. Be Diverse

Twitter is the most basic of ideas, send messages of 140 characters to everyone who’s following you but with the use of other services its easy to communicate with your followers using more than those precious 140 characters.

Post pictures on twitter using Twitpic, this is a brilliant way to communicate, remember the quote ‘a picture tells 1000 words’ its very true where Twitter is concerned. This is especially useful to provide your followers with more of an insight into your life and some people use it as middle grown between a blog post and a tweet.

Another option is video although I don’t believe it’s use on Twitter is as successful as with photo’s. The service here is yfrog but you can upload a video to any of the online video services and just link to them like a web page. My advice is to save the video for your blog.

Audioboo is a way of posting audio to Twitter, a few people have used this very successfully but I haven’t used this myself so I can’t vouch for the service.

Overall I think it’s key to keep your Twitter feed diverse, with photo’s, links, video and maybe audio. You can use all these methods or just a couple but find the ones you feel most comfortable with and use them in the most creative and interesting way you can.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Five ways to improve the quality of your Twitter feed and to promote your personal brand. Of all of these options, Twitter search is far and away the most powerful feature, and one I’d recommend you start using. Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have any questions drop me an email oli@oligibson.com