Guest Post: How Many Twitter Accounts?

by Raquel Richardson

Raquel Richardson is the owner of Silver Square, a marketing strategy firm based in Indianapolis. Visit her blog or learn more about Raquel. And don’t forget to follow her on Twitter @silversquare.

Our Tw

itter seminars are bringing light to the challenges out there on not only the Twitter scene, but the social media scene in general. We’re going to focus on this more to help you “get it” because our biggest lesson here is that it’s not that you are or are not bought in, you just don’t know what to do with it. So let’s tackle dilemma #1 – How many Twitter accounts?

I hate it when I’m reading an article to get an answer and it’s three pages later before they share it – so here is the simple answer: have one account. I think you should have one account as long as you’re able to co-exist with your work/personal life. If you’re running an account for your employer or managing your company’s brand, then that’s not where you personally provide your opinion on people, events and topics. That being said, even if you decide to open a personal account, monitor what you say or lock your account (in your settings select ‘protect my account’ which allows you to moderate who is following you and therefore not making your tweets public). Here are a few general rules for mixing your work and personal Twitter account:

1. Don’t talk about how you were a bar-hopping fool the night before if your audience is going to be in shock
2. Don’t talk about a client issue or use Twitter to vent about a client’s account; they may be following you and read it
3. Do promote your value and share relative and informative information with your followers
4. Do RT information that is valuable and informative to your followers
5. Do jump in to conversations that are appropriate and allow you to be helpful and valuable
6. Create a rule of use and stick with it, i.e. I try to spend the majority of my time, like 70% RT and sharing valuable info with a little less time on telling what I’m doing and self promoting. This meets my personal goals for Twitter use; come up with what makes sense for you.

If you must have two accounts, don’t forget which account you’re logged in to and what’s appropriate for that audience. The same professional rules apply with social networking as they do with real-world networking.

Don’t forget to check out the other posts from Twitter Tweek:

Welcome to Twitter Tweek

So You Want to Market With Twitter