Should I keep everything connected to one account or should I segment my audience?

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

Series Navigation

«Twitter: How to use it effectively and why it mattersBad Twitter habits that will get you unfollowed with no notice – excessive stream of quotes and abuse of Twitterfeed»

Filed under:
Twitter, marketing by Leonid S. Knyshov