What can you accomplish in 280 characters? Can 280 characters really generate that much personal brand? The solution is as easy as keeping things basic. When utilized properly, Twitter can be a powerful tool for creating a brand and can immediately contact your target audience, whether they be celebrities, politicians, students, or regular people. You can use Twitter to build your own brand in a variety of ways, from following to speaking for your followers.
Twitter is a platform that helps you stand out from the crowd. People make the decision to follow and trust you based on your actions, accomplishments, and tweets, all of which contribute to their own personal development.
However, it all depends on how you use Twitter for your personal branding. Is it really possible to build strong personal branding on Twitter? The answer is Yes. Here are some tips.
Establishing your personal brand on Twitter doesn’t have to be difficult if you adhere to the important guidelines below.
1. Choose your Twitter handle carefully
Your Twitter handle is your identity; after a while, people will most likely start referring to you by your handle and not by your real name. This is because your handle appears every time you tweet something, which registers in your followers’ minds. A perfect example is that of YouTuber Prajakta Koli, popularly known as MostlySane, her Twitter handle.
Twitter advises you to use your real name, but it may not be available at times due to the vast population using Twitter, who may have the same name as you do. What do you do then? Well, choose variables that define you the best, and most importantly, adhere to them. Changing handles frequently will only confuse your followers and cause you to lose backlinks. Hence, it is essential to pick the perfect handle for your account because it is the key that helps you build a personal brand on Twitter.
Here are some recommended ways to find the best handle for you.
- Retain your identity across all your social media platforms. Your name or business name is recommended.
- Keep it simple and easy to remember.
- If your name is long, try and shorten it; try using your initials
- Incorporate keywords if you can to come up faster in searches.
- Use an underscore symbol to club two or more elements and design your unique name.
2. Design and pick your brand image
Once you find a perfect handle, you need to showcase who you really are to the world. They need to relate with you, understand your style, and register your image in your minds. Like your Twitter handle, your Twitter profile picture also appears on all your Tweets.
The other important factor is the cover photo of your Twitter account. It holds a prominent position and WILL grab the attention of everyone who comes to your profile. Add a quote, your business logo, your USPs, or just a picture of you in a natural setting that reflects your personality. If you are a model, you can pick an image from a recent shoot; if you are a chef, upload pictures of your best dishes; if you are a motivational speaker, put up a picture of you speaking to a crowd. A picture does speak 1000 words when it comes to your personal branding on Twitter.
3. Build a perfect bio
You have 160 characters to tell people who you are; make the most of it. Your bio should describe what you do, your title, the companies you work with, and where you operate. When people come to your profile, they first see your handle, then your profile pictures, and next, they read your bio. People are reading your bio because they are already invested in your Twitter profile. So make sure these 160 words are the strongest weapons in your artillery to use Twitter for your personal branding effectively.
4. Tweet with a picture
Have you ever imagined why image-based posts work on all social media platforms? Apart from the algorithm that gives more push to images, people like seeing what they are reading. Because of this, AI found that people love seeing pictures, and hence it pushes posts/tweets with photos. Not all your tweets can be picture-based, but #goodmorning can offer a picture of what your morning looks like, with a glass of milk and cookies or simply the image of the sky. This will also influence your followers to follow your lifestyle and make you a thought leader.
5. Avoid spamming and using black hat tools
Success on social media comes a little late; it takes a lot of time and effort to get there. While you are on that journey of building your personal brand on Twitter, you will be tempted to use black hat tools, like increasing your followers with bots and adding more retweets or likes. It might be tempting at the onset of your journey of using Twitter for your personal branding, but you know it’s not real.
This brings us to our next point – you cannot keep managing the same fake ratio all the time. Also, a person with 1000-2000 retweets is definitely an influential person. Your followers are smart; they know the difference between fake and real followers. So, it is in your best interest to stay real on Twitter. Pretending to be someone you are not will only hamper your journey of building a personal brand on Twitter.
Read Also: How to Build a Brand on Instagram
Most importantly, don’t spam your followers. Imagine someone coming to your face and telling you something every single day. That’s exactly how it feels. Tweet them once in a while but don’t spam; you might lose a follower or two. If you intend to post frequently, make sure your content is engaging, and your followers will enjoy it.
6. Think before you tweet
Twitter is an ocean; millions are tweeting right now as you read this. Your key to a good tweet is to think before you tweet. What you tweet plays a big role in your personal branding on Twitter.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Does this go with my brand image?
- Am I adding any value to the life of my followers with this tweet? Is it relevant to my audience?
- Does this tweet help my followers and potential followers to know me better?
Once you have the answers, you can start using Twitter for your personal branding. It is better to avoid posting controversial comments and opinions unless you believe negative publicity is also publicity. There have been instances when 10-year-old tweets have come to light and hampered the careers of influential people. A recent example is James Gunn, whose tweets suddenly surfaced on the internet when he took over a movie.
You don’t want that to happen. Make sure you think twice before tweeting anything that might damage your image, today or tomorrow.
7. Strike up a conversation
Twitter is a great place to start a conversation with your peers. Everyone on Twitter is sharing their opinions and thoughts. So it is easy for you to build your personal brand by sharing your own thoughts and opinions on relevant topics of your interest. If people relate to your ideas, they will retweet them.
Apart from getting more followers, you can reach out to people organically. Your followers are your brand ambassadors; they will cover half of your marketing efforts. Make sure you strike a conversation with them by retweeting, commenting, or at least liking their quotes.
Twitter is also the easiest way to connect with your potential clients or investors. Make optimum use of hashtags, Tweet on current topics, and strike a conversation with people.
8. Follow the leaders
It matters who you follow; every time you like someone’s tweet, it appears on your follower’s feed. Make sure it is something that doesn’t make them frown. Apart from that, following the industry leader keeps you updated about your industry and ongoings. Over time, from just observing them, progress to engaging them. They might not reply initially, but eventually, they might follow you or, even better, mention you in their tweets. This will help you reach out to their audience, who also make your target audience.
9. Promotion to personality ratio
Make sure you don’t go all out to promote yourself; an overdose of promotion is a little off-putting. Your tweets should be just more than a straight promotion about your skills or art. Make your content a combination of personality and promotion, and it needs to be fresh if you are to make effective use of Twitter for your personal branding.
People who follow you on Twitter get to know about you as a person. Make sure they like the person. You are building yourself as a brand on Twitter; you should promote yourself, but let there be a balance.
10. Following to follower ratio
Unfortunately, many people on social media are judged by the following-to-follower ratio. If you follow more people than your following number, it might seem like you are someone who’s just not that influential. Again, this can be solved by uploading good content via tweets and drawing more attention.
Key Takeaways
- Choose your Twitter handle with care; remember to include your name or a keyword for your identity, and stick to it.
- Make sure your bio is an introduction to your personality and work
- Visuals create impact, tweet with a picture.
- Frequency is important, but be careful not to spam and remember to strike a conversation.
- Keep your promotion to personality ratio in check; people connect with your personality and get put off by over-promotion.
- Make sure your number of followers is higher than the people you follow.
- Getting verified is possible and straightforward if you go through Twitter’s criteria.
- Your personal brand can help you make money with sponsored tweets, so build it with care.
To conclude, whether you intend to build your personal brand to help drive sales or boost your career, the primary rule is to be clear about brand personality and stay true to it. When employing Twitter for personal branding, the key is to remain relatable; be who you are and not the brand you think other people should see.
Irrespective of whether you are an individual or a company seeking to use the power of social media to amplify your reputation, remember to follow the primary tenet of social media communication – engagement. Building a personal brand on Twitter is about having conversations. Use the platform to engage your audience, connect with your audience, and most importantly, not as a medium to merely gather connections or for one-way broadcasts.
How to Get Your Brand Noticed on Twitter
- Share positive press coverage
Sharing compelling press about your brand can provide the extra “push” to help you stand out against a sea of voices on Twitter. Keep an eye out for positive press on and off Twitter and Tweet about some of these mentions to keep you in control of your brand story.
- Actively seek conversations
Monitoring a mix of both broad and local hashtags will ensure that you’re up-to-date on all applicable conversations and avenues to enter the discussion. It’s also important to know what people are saying about your competition. Hone in on their relevant hashtags and keywords to identify gaps and industry pain points for your brand. For example, Goodlord, an online renting platform we chatted with in a recent Twitter success story, might search for Tweets containing the keywords “UK apartment search” and reply to applicable conversations.
- Be approachable
People come to Twitter to find fresh, exciting content. Companies like Casper have a strong understanding of their Twitter brand voice and aren’t afraid to test new ways to use humor in their Tweets.
- Create a Tweet Chat
Tweet Chats are a fun outlet for engaging with both current and prospective customers. To create a Tweet Chat, come up with several relevant and on-brand questions to ask your followers. Create simple graphics to accompany each question to help.
- Be strategy-focused and viral-minded
Most brands dream of their Tweets achieving viral status organically, but these trends can be hard to predict, making it infeasible to build your Twitter strategy around these odds. It’s important to have a clear roadmap while keeping a finger on the pulse on Twitter’s fast-moving trends.
