• Reverbnation – I can’t download photos in print resolution, OK otherwise. Videos link directly to Youtube. Correction: I can only download print resolution “Media Photos”, which not every artist has
• My Power Press Kits – hi-res photos are embedded in PDFs, which is endlessly annoying, but at least I can get them.
• ArtistECard – Beautiful but useless – photos are embedded and can’t be used by me, can’t easily copy the bio text. Really not a fan of this approach.
• SonicBids – I like this EPK I can easily download hi-res photos, copy text from bio, and the rest of the links are also included. The only negative is that there seem to be limitations on videos.
• Lafango – beautiful and functional. Except that videos are proprietary. Everything else I can live with. You can simply link directly to your Youtube videos in the links section.
• Epresskitz - FREE and perfect. Seriously. I can download hi-res pictures with a single click, the videos are directly on Youtube, and it’s overall very functional. Their flash intro is a gimmick that can be ignored. Yeah, send me a link to that and I will be happy. I like how it limits you at the free level so you are forced to only post 3 videos and 3 pictures. I’ll even link to them.

I will reach out to Reverb and Sonic about my findings. They should be able to adapt without too much difficulty. As a live venue promoter, I am precisely the person they need to please in order to maximize their clients’ profits.

In conclusion, I would recommend getting an Epresskitz account in addition to your usual reverb or sonic. The free level will force you to edit yourself to only your best 3 photos and videos and that will make my job so much better.

While it is tempting to use Facebook as an EPK, it doesn’t quite work that well for full-size image downloads unless you tweak things. It’s too dynamic for this purpose.

I wrote this article originally as part of my article on how to sell out your show with the aid of the venue’s in-house promotion team and it was getting too long to be a part of that post.

Have you ever wondered why the club that so enthusiastically booked you, at least that is what your manager told you, is not doing much to promote you? Here’s what life is like on the other side of the table and how to get more promotion from your venue’s in-house promotion team.

First, a little background. I work with three of the hottest Latin music live performance venues. I have to keep up with programming entertainment three days at one venue, two days at another venue, and four days at our newest venue. As you can see, I am programming entertainment for nine different days for every week. We book up to three bands per night on some nights. On a typical week, we have to advertise for 3-5 bands, and often even more.

My clubs each have 500+ people capacity, so you would make serious money if you sold out our venue.

The bands that get promoted the most are either repeat bands that I personally liked, new to me bands whose music I liked in the first two minutes of researching them, or those who provide me with a pre-written copy and an electronic press kit.

Since you are likely to be the third option (although it’s likely that I’ll like your music too), this article is for you.

Elements of the ideal electronic press kit in order of importance:

• Contact info for the band’s acting publicist (essential)
• One-paragraph bio about the band in English (priority) and whatever other language you sing in
• Five printed 8.5×11″ posters with corresponding digital versions
• Direct links to the band’s two best quality Youtube videos
• 4×6″ digital flyers in both portrait and landscape
• Digital file of group photo of the band in print resolution
• These are are nice to have
• Technical requirements rider
• Digital 11×17″ poster
• Band logo in print resolution
• Headshot of the band leader in print resolution

This may seem like a lot, but I really need all these elements as they comprise my ideal electronic press kit. Anything that is missing from this list is something I have to either create or skip. Unless I have an added incentive, I will simply skip it.

Some of this order may seem unusual, but think about it from my perspective. I am trying to get you promoted with least effort on my part. I need to be able to reach you to request additional materials.

This is what I do to promote your show: I tell my staff to post your posters on my walls, copy/paste some text my event listings on Facebook, ReverbNation, and my ticketing provider, insert your horizontal 4×6″ flyer into my website slide show and link it to my Facebook event listing, attach your vertical 4×6″ flyer to my Facebook event listing as a cover image, and attach your Youtube videos to my event listings. Boom! I am done with your band in 2 minutes and I love you even if I am not in love with your music!

The headshot, the group photo, the 11×17″ digital poster and so on are nice to have if I want to produce a combo 11×17″ poster for my club, but most of my promotion is electronic.

Anything that I skip is a missed opportunity for your band! Most bands do not have posters on my walls, for example.

I want to spend no more than 2 minutes on promoting your band

Remember that my goal is to copy/paste and not let my time go to waste.

I don’t want to spend my time writing an original article about you, figuring out which of the 20 mediocre Youtube videos is your best, looking for a good high resolution image of your band (I spent 2 hours looking for a good picture of my $30/ticket headliner this week and finally gave up, which motivated me to write this article), or doing graphic design.

My role is to introduce my existing club patrons, who are not your fans, to your band and to get them excited about seeing you perform live. Unfortunately, I also have many bands that need to be introduced. Therefore, your job is to make my job as easy as possible.

Most online EPKs are not fully sufficient for me to create my event listings. They are great to introduce your band to fans and prospective bookers, but not all of them are very good from the perspective of a venue promoter. However, just about any of the online EPK providers would make my job much easier. I’d much rather ask you directly, using the contact information in your online EPK, for the missing bits instead of having to rely on Google to find information about you.

I split my review of online EPK providers into a different article as it was getting long.

Get to know your venue’s in-house promoter

You, as the band leader, should insist on getting the contact information for the venue’s in-house promoter. It’s probably not the owner. Your booking management rarely passes along the information we need to make your show more successful.

You need my

• Phone number
• Email address
• Facebook profile
• Preferred way to communicate with me (Emailing me is not the best option, by the way. Chat with me on Facebook for fastest response)

Time is of the essence! Send me the press kit as quickly as possible!

Immediately after you are booked, email someone like me directly with all the elements I mention in this article. Just send me an email message with the text of your bio and other text elements of your EPK as I describe them below, links to your online presence, and attach the image files directly to your email message. Advise me if you sent printed posters so I can alert my staff.

Very often the in-house promoter will not be told about you until the week of your show. In fact, you should assume that no one told me anything about your band until the last minute and gave me absolutely no information about you. Seriously, that is the truth about almost every band we feature on our stage. It really can be that bad in this business.

Please use Gmail to send this as then you can have a message up to 20MB in size and large graphics will definitely increase your message size. Other email providers sometimes have smaller message limits.

Here is what I really need from you in order to effectively promote your show:

Band’s promotion point of contact (your acting publicist)

This is typically not your booking manager who has too many bands on his hands and is primarily focused on booking and finding new venues. His job is to book you at my venue. Promoting the show is secondary. He is simply too busy to interact with someone like me.

My suggestion is to pick someone from your band (must speak English and be available after 5pm) to interact with venue’s promoters and take charge of the overall promotion effort by acting as your publicist. Why after 5pm? We, the nightclub promotion people, are nocturnal species.

• Email
• Cell phone (that gets answered after 5pm)
• Preferred method to communicate with them

Full listing of your band’s social media presence in order of importance:

• Youtube channel
• Facebook page
• Facebook profile for band leader and perhaps other band members
• Online EPK, if you have one
• Non-EPK profiles on Reverbnation, SonicBids, and similar…
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• You will notice that I don’t care about your website!

One-paragraph “Bio” about your band

This should be ideally in English (priority) and Spanish (if you are a band who plays in Spanish). You would be surprised how often the promoters do not speak your language.

However, the word “Bio” here is misleading! Let me clarify what it means in this context.

What I want from you as “Bio” is primarily the answer to a few key questions

• “What is your band famous for today?”. I am asking about any music awards and critical acclaim your band received in the past. Examples would include Grammy nominations, MTV music awards, how many CDs the band released, opening for national bands, links to articles about the band, etc – no, I am not kidding about any of this and we’ve featured bands who released 50+ records and won various high caliber awards.
  
  Go big here and don’t be afraid to brag, I need to grab people’s attention.
• “What is the latest single?”. I need to know which of your songs is getting most promotion today.
• “What is your biggest hit?”. I also want to know about the previous singles that did very well.
• “Where is the band leader from?”. I want to establish heritage and and affinity with my patrons.
• “What is the band’s primary genre?”. I want to know if you are merengue, salsa, reggaeton and so on.

Any other information is irrelevant. I don’t care about your life story, but I am happy to link to it. Help me sell your band to new fans.

This point is very important, so I will repeat it twice. I really need your “Bio” information in English for our Latin bands!

Here is what I would say about Fulanito, whose music I personally enjoy and whom we featured multiple times, as a skeleton for his paragraph:

About Fulanito

Fulanito is a Merengue artist who released 7 albums and comes from Dominican Republic. He is a two-time Grammy nominee for “Best Latin Album”. You heard his hit singles such as the mega-hit “Guallando” and the most recent single “Take it off”.

Can I write a lot more?

Sure, for Fulanito I can spend extra time on research and write a magazine article if I really wanted to.

However, that paragraph tells you about the band’s biggest hit “Guallando” and their most recent hit “Take it off”, where they are from, and what they are famous for. That, coupled with some hot videos, is enough to get someone’s attention.

You can send me a longer story, but I need a one-paragraph version with answers to my key 5 questions that I can simply copy/paste in addition to whatever manuscript you choose to send me. Put your one paragraph intro at the very top of your bio. I really don’t want to edit down your life story if I can simply copy/paste one paragraph of text.

If I have to edit your life story and it takes me more than 2 minutes, I am more likely to skip it entirely. I can’t include a multi-page life story for each of my 3 bands in my Facebook event listing and some info about my DJ and a page of info about my venue specials, amenities, and policies. Who is going to read all that?

Ship me some posters

Ship me 5-7 pre-printed 8.5×11″ posters that I can put on my wall with some space on them to write down the date of show. I’ll put one on my front door, one or two on my club walls and patio doors, one in each restroom, and one by each bar. While it’s nice to have 11×17″ posters, 8.5×11″ are a lot cheaper to print and would be equally effective inside the club.

This is very important: if the poster is good enough to not make the club look ugly, it will probably get posted by someone even before I see it because any club staff member can do this unlike the rest of our promotional efforts.

If I don’t have to print it, and most clubs can’t print an 11×17″ poster in-house so they have to make a trip to a copy store, it will get posted faster. Here is a scan of a wall poster that was on my club’s wall. Someone simply added a date with a Sharpie on the 11×17″ posters. On the digital copy, a few days later after I finally got it, I added the date with my editing software. Both actions took mere seconds and so this event got a lot of exposure at our clubs. You will notice that prints were posted first!

Since the promotion company did not give me a digital file, but they gave me plenty of prints, I had to scan this 8.5×11″ poster and so the digital quality is not optimal. Therefore, if you are shipping me some prints, please also include a copy of this file on the CD in your package.

Add a QR code to your poster

By the way, I would add a QR code to your poster that links directly to your main online presence (Website, facebook, youtube, reverb whatever). Just go to http://bit.ly and shorten your main URL. Then take the resulting link like one of my links http://j.mp/zedumg and add a .qrcode to that. Now your http://j.mp/zedumg becomes http://j.mp/zedumg.qrcode and that will have an image file of your QR code. You can track every scan of that code, by the way.

I would do this for both digital and printed posters.

Direct links to two of your very best Youtube videos.

Ideally, these should be your biggest hits with professional sound. I will link to them directly from my Facebook event listing that I will send to my club’s 5000+ friends and the objective here is make them fall in love with your sound. It must be Youtube because it will be directly embedded into your Facebook event listing.

Remember that I am typically not your fan, at least not until I heard you on my stage, and it is very likely that never even heard about your band. I can either choose to scrounge Youtube for your videos and try to find one where you both sound and look good, or I can do something more fun like spend more time on the dance floor with some hotties. Guess what I would rather do?

If you send me your Reverbnation EPK (electronic press kit), that is still not enough. How am I supposed to know which are your very best songs if you send me 20 videos? I don’t have time to view 20 videos.

If all your videos have terrible sound, link me to some Soundcloud tracks. Whatever audio/video you choose to link to must be directly playable on Facebook.

Oh, and I really hate those self-indulgent intro videos that are recorded with booming radio DJ’s voice. I will never link to those.

Digital 4×6″ flyers

An image file of a professional-looking 4×6″ flyer complete with your show date information and my club information or enough space where I can easily add my showtime information as I’ve done on Julio Bravo’s flyer. I can print a copy of that on 11×17″ and call it a day. I can also include that on my website as part of my slideshow and you will stand out from my other flyers.

I need a vertical “portrait” flyer for your “Facebook Skyscraper” – the image that gets seen at the top of the event listing and usually works best in vertical orientation.

I need a horizontal “landscape” flyer for your website slideshow and for your Facebook wall photo.

Pre-printed flyers would be nice, but they get expensive. If you are printing something, print me some posters instead. That is going to cost you a lot less and will still get you a lot of exposure.

Here I added my blue club logo, my contact info, and the date. The rest of the flyer was provided by the band.

Compare it to my in-house flyer. Notice that my in-house flyer focuses on promoting the night rather than the band itself.

I can give you a tip to maximize your investment in pre-printed flyers. You can pre-print a bunch of flyers and leave an area of them white. You can then run them through a laser printer (this is commonly done with envelopes, so look up how to print envelopes with a laser printer) and add showtime information specific to my club.

I am very happy to leave a stack of these flyers on my flyer table. Most other bands will not do that, so you will get a lot of attention. Be sure to include your information similar to what you see on the Montez image in the previous point. You want your new fans to be able to find you quickly.

That is exactly what I do with my in-house flyers in order to track the efforts of my outside promoters, but most clubs do not have someone who knows how to do that. Ideally, you would have both a vertical (portrait) and a horizontal (landscape) 4×6″ flyer. I would use the portrait flyer on my Facebook event listing and the horizontal flyer on my website slide show.

One good high-resolution group picture for your poster

One good high-resolution picture that I don’t have to edit other than to add my club logo, date of show, and my club contact info. I want to simply print it 11×17″ and post it on the wall of my club as quickly as possible to maximize your exposure. If you have nothing else, send me a high resolution file of your CD cover or your proposed CD cover.

Let me show you an example of a very good promotional image that I used to promote this show. Montez de Durango projects the image of a successful band. Notice the band’s logo, clear shot of all band members, interesting background, the band’s official social media pages, and plenty of space at the top where I can add my own graphics.

Reverbnation RPKs do not let us easily download hi-resolution images unless you specifically upload “media” photos.

One good headshot of the band leader

It’s always nice to have a headshot of someone that can be used as part of something we are making in-house to help promote the show.

Reverbnation RPKs do not let us easily download hi-resolution images unless you specifically upload “media” photos.

Your band’s logo

This is important if I decide to promote you on Facebook and do presales. Since I have a very limited amount of space, I will use your logo, not my club’s to feature in your ad. I’ve done that for Fulanito and Montez.

What the sound engineer needs to know (technical rider)

I put this in the end as this is not strictly for me (although I know my way around the mixing console), but it would help us to better prepare for your show. Think of me as being in the twilight and the sound engineer being in pitch darkness about your band. I can at least look you up online, hear what you sound like, and so on. The sound engineer’s job is to rig you up ready to go live in a matter of minutes based on zero information. I’ve seen them look up band pictures to try to guess what technical requirements the band might have. It is a very stressful task!

Your sound engineer will treat you like a rock star if you can provide him with this information and I will certainly share it with him in advance.

Ideally, you would simply send me your “technical rider”. If you do not yet have one, it’s a very good idea to create one now. You should assume that the venue did not share with the sound engineer your technical rider you submitted when they signed your contract. I know this may sound absurd, but I am telling you directly what you need to know based on reality.

Here is what we really need to know:

• Total number of band members, their names, and what instruments do they play. Please list all of the instruments and special configurations like drum mics so we can properly mic your drums and accommodate multiple keyboards, acoustic guitars, harmonicas, etc.
• Total number of microphones and direct boxes required per show.
• Does your singer require a special mic? Most will sound great with a base Shure SM58 but some singers absolutely require a high sensitivity mic like a Sennheiser e840 or a Shure Beta series mic to be heard properly. Please be sure to let us know in advance if you are planning to use a condenser mic as that can create some additional challenges if the venue uses mic splitters.If we don’t know about your special mic requirements, we can’t make you sound your very best. If you are one of the people who has special mic requirements and we hand you a regular mic, your voice will sound like a muffled AM radio and the instruments will drown you out further.No one will enjoy that performance. I am personally very annoyed when I hear that, especially when the instruments sound great, but by that point it is simply too late.
• What are your monitoring requirements (how many monitors, how do you like them positioned, what instruments do you want in each mix, and so on). If I have 2 monitors on my stage and you require 4, we are probably not going to have an easy time with your show, right? We can’t always accommodate all monitoring requests, mostly for budgetary or technical reasons, but it doesn’t hurt to let us know what you prefer so we can try our best to meet your requirements.
• What are your preferred channel allocations? This is optional, but could be handy.

Your in-house promoter is like a (very lazy) music journalist

Think of me as someone who writes articles for music magazines. These writers typically get a press kit sent to them by the band’s publicist. Some of my listings were republished as articles with little modification, and some I sourced from various magazines as well.

The less original research I have to perform, the more likely your story will be more complete and you will receive more promotion from the venue. I want to be done with you in 2 minutes.

If I am not your fan (I doubt I am Hunks’ target demographic…), but I have all these elements, I am happy to copy/paste all this into all my various places where I promote my events and move on to the next band. Our articles (event listings) do not have to be perfect. In fact, there is no requirement for there to be an article and I can skip over writing anything about your band, which I do most of the time if it starts to require too much research. There is no editor to whom you can appeal my event listing.

Therefore, we are lazy. Do our work for us and we will happily promote your band to everyone we know.

Lastly, I am going to refer you to a very good graphic designer. It is crucial to work with someone who truly understands this business. His name is Brian at Elite Design Works and he does exceptionally good work when it comes to flyers even if you do not know what you want. You will also like his rates.

By the way, if you are not booked yet, if you walk in with all this into my club, in addition to your demo CD, you are probably going to increase your chances of being booked.

A great online video consists of several key elements

• Presenter
• Content
• Visuals
• Audio track
• Videography

Audio is more important than video for your online presentations

Surprised? Think about how you currently produce your web videos and your web meetings. Oh, right. You do not produce them. You call into your webinar from your cell phone and hope that your prospects that you fought so hard to bring into this meeting are paying attention to you. Convenient? Sure. Does it cost you sales? You bet it does.

You may well be using better technology for producing your product videos, but why are you subjecting your live prospects to the remnants of 19th century technology.

The telephone was invented in April of 1876.

Regardless of how great your telephone device is, you are still subject to the limitations of the phone network from 1876. The analog telephone network is limited to 3khz of bandwidth. That is likely meaningless to you, but you surely know the difference between listening to a 32kbps mono MP3 and 192kbps stereo MP3. The 32kbps sounds like AM radio. The 192kbps file sounds like a CD recording to most people with the exception of some audiophiles.

Would you make a music record using your cell phone?

If a 32kbps file sounds like AM radio, what do you think a 9.6kbps file sounds like?

The actual bandwidth of the GSM codec used by your cell phone is 9.6kbps

Everything you say gets downgraded to sound quality that is far below even that of AM radio.

Consider how the people are consuming your live presentations. Are they sitting at the computer? Can they listen to your presentation using their computer?

Which of the following sounds better?

• You -> telephone -> cloud -> listener’s computer
• You -> cloud -> listener’s computer

Buy this. This microphone costs less than $25. As of this writing, it was $18!

Audio Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional Condenser Microphone

Every computer today is equipped with a sound interface. Why not take full advantage of that?

If you must dial-in, please, use Skype. The quality of a Skype call is far superior to any cell phone conversation.

Audio quality is critical to the success of any virtual presentation. There does not have to be any difference between a marketing video and a live web conference call. Use the same equipment.

Video can be produced in two ways

• Screencast
• Live action video

A camera is simply not required for a screencast. An engaging presenter equipped with sufficient audio tools does not necessarily need a live action video.

Pay attention to how TV news programs are produced. There is not a single moment on your TV screen where there is a static image. They use slow panning for images. You may want to look into techniques how to introduce that to your videos.

Still working on the video portion of this post… stay tuned

This is an interesting question because I see some of my friends who should be separating their Twitter accounts and others who should be combining their accounts.

Most articles I read about Twitter tend to suggest that I should use a single account for everything. I am not sure I entirely agree with that.

You may want to have multiple personalities for several reasons

You are a musician, and your band’s name is known more than you are personally

For example, let us look at @Sevendust – I have not seen them in ages, I have no idea what the lead singer’s name might be, but I know his band’s name and surely enough is has a Twitter account.

You operate or represent a business, and your business name is more well-known than you are personally

One interesting example would be @Nascar – Nascar is not yet on Twitter as an organization as of this writing, but someone took the opportunity to assume that name and to provide Nascar fans with real-time updates. I do not necessarily need to know his name if I only care about Nascar updates.

You are a writer for a well-known publication

I recently helped a friend to start a dedicated Twitter account for her writings for San Francisco Examiner. I let her post the articles as she always does and took care of writing high CTR teasers in Twitter. CTR is an industry term for “click-through rate”. She’s @SFIndieMusic, if you are curious. Because the focus is on music lovers, rather than solely Examiner readers, the word Examiner is not a part of her username. She is identified as such in her bio.

You will note that her name combines multiple common search terms. Everything on Twitter is about expressing the most information in fewest characters. At times, that means not even mentioning your own name in the bio line. I will go into further detail on writing effective Twitter bios in another article.

You have multiple distinctly different businesses or divisions

I operate a lot of web sites. They can be anything from marketing, to online dating, to product listings, to photography advice, to data recovery, and then there is also my meta-site that aggregates all that content into one giant mix.

So far, they are connected to my main @Wiseleo account, but I am quite a chatterbox. For those who would appreciate a cleaner news feed, I have dedicated accounts with some limited cross-promotion.

@Playboy magazine is doing it right – they have several distinct identities

• @Playboy is their primary brand
• @PlayboyU is their college life brand
• @RockTheRabbit is their music brand
• @PlayboyUK is their UK brand

And who knows what else they might be using. By using multiple identities, they allow their audience to subscribe to only the parts of most interest to them.
For instance, if I only care about notifications of new Model of the day, I will simply follow @Playboy. If I care about their music, I’ll follow @RockTheRabbit.

Twitter vs. The World at Large!

Twitter vs. LinkedIn bio

On LinkedIn, we must cram all that we do into one account because we can only have personal accounts. On Twitter, we can dedicate an account to each niche that we represent.

If your Twitter bio mentions multiple things that each could generate a discrete following, you are probably better off creating multiple Twitter profiles.

Compare my keyword optimized bio with my general bio

• On LinkedIn -Data recovery expert, social networks profiles writer, SEO expert, IT expert in general (14yr experience), Entrepreneur
• On @Wiseleo – World-class computer expert. Founder of Crashproof Solutions. Online dating expert.
• On @Hotprofiletips – Use online dating and social networking sites. Control top of the list and increase your appeal. Write effective headlines. Become attractive and irresistible!

In fact, I will be changing that @Wiseleo bio soon.

My LinkedIn bio suggests several distinctly different niches for which I am qualified to write. Due to limited space of even fewer characters, I didn’t mention many other talents, such as my ability to bring Exchange and SQL servers back from the dead when Microsoft gives up on them.

I think you will agree that once Google indexes my @Hotprofiletips (it has not yet as of this writing) I will be more likely to gain more readers

The bio line is exactly 160 characters. Although it is readable, it is heavily packed with premium keywords. Further, as Twitter’s people search engine improves, this will become increasingly more important. Could I write a better headline? Yes, but it is quite difficult with the 160 characters contstraint. However, remember that Google search results mix keywords in bio and and in updates. I may replace the “control top of the list” sentence with “Appear at top of search results list” and eliminate the fluff word of appeal. The current bio will rank highly for “irresistible dating profile tips” or something along those lines.

For now, you can run a Twitter bio people search by running a custom Google query such as “site:twitter.com Online dating expert”

Quick tip to make writing 160 char bios easier

Write it in a twitter client! It will continually count down the characters. Just be sure not to hit submit.

Twitter vs. Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages just got upgraded. While they are now somewhat similar to Twitter, as you can post status updates and they will show up in your followers’ news feeds, they are not quite as engaging. In order to overhear a conversation and reply to it, a Facebook follower needs to actively read that Page’s wall as only the status updates and other posts made by the Page’s owner will show up in his newsfeed. While it’s easy to “follow” a Facebook page, you can achieve substantially higher engagement with your audience through Twitter.

Twitter vs. RSS,XML,ATOM

Looking at my HotProfileTips site, I add content to it fairly infrequently. Subscribing to that RSS feed is relatively pointless because I don’t write often enough to remain on someone’s top 20 list of RSS feeds.

I personally follow about 60 websites through XML ATOM feeds daily, but I am a techie. With Twitter, my readers can follow that account and get updated eventually without having to configure any XML feed readers.

Twitter is slowly but surely replacing my XML feed reader because I get nearly real-time updates rather than delayed feed updates.

Keep it personal, but interesting

Every night I get a flood of tweets relating to someone’s sleep cycle. It doesn’t make your corporate Twitter account more personal.

When you follow over a hundred people, you learn to appreciate those who choose not to mention this subject or routine food updates.

Oh, and change the default icon, please.

Automatic vs. manual updates

The lazy way to tweet is to use something like TwitterFeed, which is OK, but if you adjust the tweets to be more enticing manually, which does not involve much effort, you are more likely to have your followers click through to the main article.

Managing multiple Twitter accounts

I use either Twhirl or TwitterFox. Both have ability to login to multiple accounts. Twhirl lets you be logged into multiple accounts simultaneously, while TwitterFox lets you switch between accounts with a single click.

You will likely gravitate toward Twhirl eventually.

There are also meta posting tools that will post to multiple accounts, but to me they are redundant. I am a big fan of Twhirl for that reason.

Effective cross-promotion of related accounts

While it may be tempting to give a brand account two or more meanings, that only serves to confuse the reader. A far more effective approach is to interject related tweets by using the re-tweet feature.
As an example, @Playboy would re-tweet a @RockTheRabbit announcement. This broadens the channel and builds related brand awareness.

Re-tweeting simply means that you would issue the update on the niche account, but also cross-post it on your main account. I operate a website for highly technical online dating advice. My visitors learn all the unsexy things like ideal photo dimensions, how to be at the top of their dream girl’s search results, and other related original research.

I posted this update to my @Hotprofiletips account with 1 follower

The importance of white space Time and time again I come across profiles that are genuinely painful to read. One of.. http://snurl.com/domqr

Original tweet: http://twitter.com/hotprofiletips/statuses/1317949092

I then posted this update to my main @Wiseleo account with 90+ followers

RT: @hotprofiletips: The importance of white space. Time and time again I come across profiles that are painful… http://snurl.com/domqr

Original tweet: http://twitter.com/wiseleo/statuses/1317960296

There are instances when you simply must separate accounts to avoid brand dilution

I have a friend who is the Twitter face of a major corporation, or so it appears. She should separate those identities at this point as the majority of those updates are not related to that corporation. There are a few other people whom I follow who have mostly personal updates on supposedly corporate accounts.To protect the not so innocent, I won’t mention those names.

Those personal updates are simply a waste of my time. Worse yet, it dilutes the brand in Twitter searches. As Twitter’s power as a real-time search engine continues to increase, you are more likely to gain followers by posting relevant information instead of useless filler updates.

Here is a simple test whether you need to separate your Twitter accounts

• Are the updates on your branded account primarily of personal nature?
• Would those updates be of interest solely to those who follow your brand and not you personally?
• Do you have multiple missions that you are attempting to address with a single account?

Ultimately, there is only one key question

If you were to send this content via a mailing list, would you use your own name or your company name in the “From:” line for the majority of your updates?

If you answered this question by saying “I would use my company name”, then those updates should be sent from a dedicated Twitter account.

About the author

Leonid S. Knyshov (@Wiseleo on Twitter) writes about business and marketing on http://www.knyshov.com