You must get separate personal and business Twitter accounts. Stop being lazy and do it now. Stan Berteloot, Marketing Director at KDS, gave the same bit of advice during his talk, “Follow Me on Twitter” at the STC France annual conference, where I gave a keynote address recently.
This is what’s happening: Francophilia, my startup, has its own Twitter account with hundreds of followers. Francophilia wants to follow all the francophiles back. But Francophilia can’t always tell if followers are actually francophiles, or if they’re just flagrant and indiscriminate self-promoters who have no interest in France or Frenchy stuff.
Take Rawinvstg, for example. Short (and hard to remember) for Raw Investigations, “an online music mag.” Now, maybe the person/people running that account are actually francophiles, but because the account is a “business” account, I have no idea if there’s a francophile behind the curtain.
Then there’s cellphonebestbu (another abbreviation mishap). Are the owners of this company that sells cell phone accessories in Mississauga, Canada, francophiles? I may never know. What I do know is that I don’t want to get their updates on their latest greatest deal for bluetooth headsets. So Francophilia is not following them back.
Among Francophilia’s legit business followers are boutique owners, wine merchants, real estate agents dealing in French property, gourmet shops, etc. This makes sense. But PETA? Or a religious charity? Or an online brokerage firm? There’s something fishy going on here.
I have two Twitter accounts, one for plain old me and one for Francophilia. I had the courtesy to create separate accounts because I didn’t want to waste the time of Francophilia followers with my updates and vice versa. You see?
As far as I’m concerned, Twitter only makes sense if genuine communities are formed. But how do we separate the “real” people from the imposters? Your thoughts?
Here’s a related post I wrote for Web Worker Daily, in which I emphasize the dangers of having your Twitter feed on your professional blog or site…
Peter
April 19, 2009
What has definitely made me stop “twittering” was the ‘personal’ user generated content on Twitter making it an experience that became tiring and irrelevant.
Sure, I may have “followed” the wrong people, but I basically got tired reading people’s personal trivialities in 160 characters or less, mixed with one liners from professional publication I did want to check out.
Separating personal and professional accounts is a must on Twitter, but even so, I never felt at ease with the concept. Guess that I’m like many of the French: they won’t easily try to cram a meaningful message in 160 characters or less ;-)
Pamela Poole
April 19, 2009
As I said on frogblog once, I think people are still trying to figure out how to make it meaningful at this point. Some have. It makes sense when special interest communities are built with it, and when the people following each other actually care about the details of the others’ lives, whether personal or professional. But the truth is there aren’t that many people whose personal details you want.