Forget everything I said in my last post!
I just backed down my three Twitter accounts to one. My original thought was that I should have one for each major interest in my life. The @heatherlarson account I have is the Twitter account I’ve had the longest, since March 2007. I used to be afraid I’d annoy my followers with my on-air tweets when I’m on 98.7 The Peak, so I created @heathercast. Eventually, true Peak fans found me in both places and thought it was confusing for me to have two accounts.
I Must Be Confused…
I like to take my Macbook to the station and do 12 Seconds videos when I’m on the air, but my 12 Seconds account was linked only to my @heatherlarson account, so I’d have to retweet those 12 seconds videos from @heathercast. That’s a good example of how it got confusing. Then I was getting a lot of spam followers on @heathercast. I’m also on the air so rarely, usually only every other weekend, so my followers got used to me being on @heatherlarson.
Finding A Focused Audience
I rarely get on @curecjd, and I should more often. I don’t think that I shouldn’t tweet about CJD from the @heatherlarson account. But the beauty of the @curecjd account is that I am following only CJD-oriented people there, so they aren’t getting lost in the ton of followers I have at my oldest account. I think I’ll still log into it and post links to blogs there when I write them for curecjd.wordpress.com and to see what people interested in CJD are tweeting about.
It’s All About Me
So over time, the @heatherlarson Twitter account has become the all-encompassing, all-about-me type of thing it really should be since it bears my name. I think in the beginning when I created @heathercast, it was possible to offend people by tweeting too much about being on the air, so it was a good idea at the time. Tweeting too much of one thing did run the risk of turning off followers. But Twitter has really grown and evolved to where I don’t think people get too uptight if you get on one subject for a while. Sometimes I worry that too much shameless self-promotion turns people off, so I try to mix it up. Because I DO unfollow people who consistently do only shameless self-promotion about one thing and never join the conversation.
Audience Building
My advice for those new to Twitter is to keep it real. Be you. Twitter is part of your brand and helps you stand out. It helps you network with people of like minds across the world and also with people in your town who become your audience. Whatever I do, whether it is being on the air, blogging, or writing, the name of the game is to build an audience. Writers need readers. Radio personalities need listeners. If you’re blogging and Tweeting right now to market yourself for work, then you’re a job seeker who needs an employer. Widget sellers need buyers, and so on. Don’t believe the people who think blogs and Twitter are silly. If someone thinks it’s just about self-centered real-time “what I’m doing right now” updates, they’ve missed the point. When you approach these social networking sites like the valuable tools they are, you won’t be disappointed.
Writer Heather Larson 