Are you on Twitter yet?

I work in marketing and business. I’m supposed to know all about branding and yet I’m getting confused about social media. I had these grand ideas about compartmentalising my use of social media channels.

I use Facebook for keeping in touch with my personal friends (some of whom I’ve worked with in the past), LinkedIn to keep in touch with present/past colleagues, business/career contacts I’ve met along the way (some of whom happen to be personal friends) and then I decided to sign up to Twitter to see what that was all about, which turns out to be a mixture of everything. The liquorice allsorts of social media I call it.

I was just using Twitter for personal reasons but now all of these professional people are following me, I’m feeling under pressure to be professional so I’ve linked my blog to my profile. However, Twitter is all about people and we are not just our professional selves nor our personal selves. One reflects the other. And whilst I don’t invite people I don’t know to connect with me on Facebook or LinkedIn (some people do, but I’m just not comfortable about it), Twitter is all the more interesting because you can ‘follow’ or be ‘followed’ by anyone without them having access to too much personal information about you.

So I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Guy Kawasaki’s book and ‘tweet’ about whatever I feel like, whatever subjects interest me but, crucially, which I think will also be of interest to others. Nobody wants to follow a crashing bore who drones on about how great they are and never listens to anyone else.

All of which takes me to the subject of marketing. You can use all or selected social media to build your business or personal brand but you have to remember that you are dealing with people and you or your brand needs to be seen as a person so that your audience can relate to you.

I will leave you with a list of 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business from Time.