Guest Post by Sanjiva Persad
My Twitter experience began over three years ago with an anonymous account.
As time went on, and I started working in the social media industry, I was faced with a conundrum.
I liked my anonymity, but I had to practise what I preached.
So I created a more professional Twitter account, with the intention of making a grand announcement one day.
I had it all planned out; I would tweet my real identity, and all my followers would shift to my professional profile, and all would be right with the world.
But I kept putting it off, and now I don’t think I’m going to do that anymore.
Here’s why:
1. I like my anonymity.
I don’t tweet anything insulting or horrible, but there are times when I don’t necessarily want my identity to be known.
Also, with tweets becoming increasingly prominent on search engine results pages, it’s probably best if song lyrics in all caps don’t pop up when someone Googles me.
2. My anonymous account may be frivolous, but I built a certain brand around my anonymous self.
I’m strangely attached to it, and I’m not sure that I want to throw it away.
3. There’s no guarantee that all my followers would move to the professional account.
Or half of them.
Or any of them.
4. The beauty of having two accounts is that you can follow twice as many people.
I wouldn’t have thought that I needed to follow 4,000 people, but I’m not far away from that total “following” count now.
This micro-blogging duplicity is nothing new, and has been covered in detail by Jens P. Berget, and also by Social Media, Esq.™.
Here are some of my firsthand observations:
1. People engage with you more when you have your face as your avatar rather than an arbitrary picture or logo.
2. Gaining followers is much easier when you have your face as your avatar, and a descriptive Twitter bio.
I suspect that I gain followers twice as quickly on my personal Twitter account than my anonymous one, while tweeting half as much.
3. I’ve found myself struggling on my professional account to do the things that I do so well on my anonymous account, such as actually engaging with people instead of just retweeting and tweeting articles about social media.
4. Some people have figured out that the same person maintains both accounts.
It’s not exactly a secret, but it’s funny that some people engage with both my profiles and don’t know that it’s the same person.
Or maybe they suspect and haven’t let on.
5. When someone retweets a tweet from my professional account, and I see myself pop up in my anonymous account, it still makes me jump.
In general, I would recommend having two accounts.
Sure, it’s more work, and the constant,”Which account should this come from?” questioning can get tiresome…
… but I think I’d be missing out if I merged my accounts, or got rid of one.
I would love to hear about your experiences with two Twitter accounts via a comment below, and whether your non-professional account is anonymous or not.
What say you?
Image: OperationPaperStorm via Flickr, CC 2.0
Sanjiva Persad is a London-based social media marketer and copywriter who specialises in helping small businesses build their brand online. His home on the web is sanjivapersad.com. He also blogs and tweets.
Just letting you know that in this article you’re linking to slymarketing.com which used to be owned by Jens-Petter Berget.
slymarketing.com used to be a legit website but it has recently changed ownership and is now a spam domain – the URL you’re pointing to doesn’t even exist and redirects.
I just thought I would let you know – please check for yourself.
Many thanks,
Fred
Thanks so much, Fred – I really appreciate it! We did check and fixed it. I SO appreciate you pointing this out – you rock!
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I have two accounts, I’ve had issues w/pictures being the right size so one account is the old bird icon w/stars & a yellow ribbon, the other is just an egg (really need to do something about this one). The egg is my name, used more professionally, the bird is a somewhat-anonymous account (only my first name is listed), mostly just things I don’t want associated with me professionally (politics, medical issues, tv shows, music, some venting, etc.). As a person who’s normally works or is awake when others are sleeping, it’s nice to have a place I can vent when my friends are too busy or sleeping.
Thanks very much for the comment, @silvrstar . I’ve noted with interest the variety of reasons that people have multiple accounts, and the need to vent is definitely a common one!
@patquirkeclonmel now that I know you have livefyre Pat going to rope you into everything! LOL
@HowieSPM He Howie, good to meet you here as well! I didn’t know that your “personal one was not very developed” hahaha:) I run 2 accounts and this post is spot on.
@Shonali @shakirah_dawud @sanjivapersad Same Shonali, like my blog I now see my professional Twitter account as an extension of my portfolio, my social media reputation. WYSIWYG so if someone likes what I tweet on PR, doesn’t mind my cheering for the ATL Braves and LSU, or recommending a good wine once in a while, mores the better. And if they don’t want to work w/ me because they are intimidated by the superiority of SEC football, that’s fine too. ;-)
Nice to see it’s not just me. I’ve blogged about the secret Twitter profiles, for those things we don’t want in our public streams. I say public knowing they all are (if unlocked) but then, the anonymity does allow for some “privacy.” Goes back to whatever one’s Twitter strategy is. I started with 2 accounts, the anonymous personal so I could figure it all out; the professional and public which has evolved. I’ve moved many follows from personal to professional and do show a good bit more personality, but am still very much about the business.
For example @shakirah_dawud I don’t mind if some of the client networking stuff would crossover. But then when it’s a “Dear Client” rant, that goes via a personal Twitter. Really my personal Twitter has become not much more than a chat room for other friends on certain topics, things I don’t want clogging my stream. Like @HowieSPM on politics, I’m not going to let my rants or tweets about TV or whatever. I mean I’ll cheer for LSU in my normal stream, but a spontaneous profanity laced diatribe about the poor call an idiot referee just made, that belongs someplace that’s else.
Good point @sanjivapersad about allowing more follows! I’ve hit that cap a few times, so I’ve been able to move a few folks – news feeds, random stuff, snobs who don’t follow me back ;-) – to my personal Twitter, still keep an eye on some things. Figuring out from which account to tweet isn’t hard for me as each account really has its own agenda, profile, personality… per my strategy. Perhaps that’s the trick, FWIW.
@HowieSPM So your split personality is gradually becoming more cohesive? :p
@shakirah_dawud So here’s where I’ll play devil’s advocate re: the lower level of activity on your “company” profile. I’d argue (and I’ve done it before) that at the end of the day, chemistry is what wins business. Regardless of how great a writer you are (and you know I think you are, else you wouldn’t be a contributor here :)), there are several other great writers around – just like there are several extremely smart and qualified PR pros around. I’d wager that 95% of the time, we’ll come up with fairly similar approaches to campaigns, etc. – because there’s only so much one can do, right?
So what makes a potential client decide to go with X over Y? Maybe geography is important, though I’ve been finding it less and less so. It’s the personality you bring to the project, that convinces the client you can get the job done. In fact, I recently had a client who’d followed me for over a year on Twitter (his words, not mine), and I had no clue. After a year, there was an opportunity for PR, and he approached me – via Twitter DM. I went through an RFP process and won the business. So my silly dog/food/whatever tweets clearly didn’t have a negative impact there… and my $0.02 is that if they do that to anyone, our personalities are likely to be so different that it wouldn’t be a good idea to do business together anyway.
Also, I just don’t have the energy to manage 2 accounts for myself. So hats off to you, @sanjivapersad and anyone else who can pull it off!
@sanjivapersad @ErinG There was an interesting post from shelholtz a while back on the whole “face as an avatar” thing for brands. I personally don’t mind logos from big companies. To me, that makes it look more professional. And just as Shel posits in his post, to me what is important is the information and service I get from them. Also, if a company decides to use a person’s photo, whose will they use? The CEO’s (even if he doesn’t actually tweet)? The customer service rep? Etc. etc.
I think it’s different for people who work independently, such as myself. Regardless of where you stand on the personal branding debate, the fact is that you’re the one person (speaking generally here, not specifically to you) that potential clients, etc., will interact with. So for me and, I think, other independents, it makes more sense to have the personal image. In fact, I drove @commammo crazy until he changed his avatar from his logo to his face.
I like my anonymity, but sooner or later they will ask for my identity card. When they finally got interested,
then they always will ask for your real name.
F @HowieSPMGood point about the extra accounts, Howie. I think among us we’ve uncovered 7 extras. One of these days they’re going to discover you could fit all the people on Twitter in a backyard swimming pool…
I actually have 4 accounts plus a clients I run. But now I just have my business account which has melded 3 of my accounts. And my clients and my one for politics which I am not active on but I do post when needed when I get outraged LOL
I had a very hard time building the 4 personas. So my one for Music has migrated to my work account and my personal one was not very developed so was easy to put on ice. I also like anonymity. I like being Chief Alien of my company but I am ok with Business stuff being searchable with my real name but Google started being flooded because I commented so much on News Sites, Ad Industry and other.
All your points and experiences are dead on Sanjiva. And btw I wonder how many of the 200 million Twitter accounts and 600 Million Facebook Accounts are extra accounts, spam accounts, and robot accounts? Of course it benefits the networks when they are able to inflate gross numbers.
@shakirah_dawud Shakirah, that’s really interesting. I have to admit that I’ve never given any thought to having two professional accounts, but I don’t think it sounds odd. I look forward to hearing the results of your master plan :-)
@Sushi Thanks for sharing your experience, Sushi. I think your point about consistency is a really key one, and it’s a major part of the challenge of keeping up two different profiles.
@ErinG Thanks for your comment, Erin. I think companies are still deciding the best course of action in the logo vs face avatar debate, but I guess that’s the beauty of social media; we’re all still learning and deciding what’s best. Oh, and I haven’t read Twitterville, but I’ll add it to my reading list. Thanks for the tip!
@Lori Thank you, Lori! It’s definitely double duty, but I think the rewards in the long run make it worthwhile :-)
Wow, this has been on my mind for weeks, Sanjiva. I have two accounts, one the “professional/casual me” and the other the “professional/company me.” The “casual” one is where I talk to peers, keep up with the news in my industry, and follow people of interest. I’m far less active in the other “company” one because (and this is going to sound really odd) I’m targeting my follows as mostly prospective clients, and I don’t want to mess up with tweeting too much or tweeting uninteresting stuff and have them unfollow me. Completely ridiculous, but I can’t get past it. I’m probably losing more people and gaining more bots by tweeting erratically than not.
But I don’t want to dump or merge accounts, so one will probably stay in limbo for the time being. I do have a master plan though, and after a bit I’ll see if it works and let you know. Thanks for sharing your experience!
I’ve been wondering the same thing, especially as I go into the professional world. Anonymity exists for me only in the sense that my real name isn’t attached to my Twitter account, but anyone who can Google can figure it out. I’m also well-known in some circles as the username I go by on Twitter and almost everywhere else online. Besides the lack of real name (which is Google unique), I hold few qualms about what I post online. The lack of real photo isn’t because I don’t want to connect the two identities; it’s because the idea of capturing a person in an instant weirds me out and I’d have to see that picture every time I go to the website or use a GUI client. There’s a story behind this, really. So if I were to switch to my real name, no one would know who I am due to username disconnect. There’s a lot to be said about consistency.
Hi Sanjiva –
Thanks for your post! You make some excellent points about the struggle between anonymity and personality. Up until a few months ago, I also had a generic avatar, then realized what you realized – that people want to interact with with people. Afterall, that’s what Twitter is about. It’s about communities of people interacting. Although once I did put my photo and real name in my profile, my tweets become more restrictive. It was as if my profile pic was a stamp of accountability. All of a sudden, I was careful about everything that I was saying, knowing that anyone – even future employers – would be able to find me. So I definitely see the merits of having two twitter accounts.
I think what you say also applies to companies that have a corporate voice rather than an individual’s. How can a logo “engage with people”? It doesn’t seem genuine. I think the best companies on twitter have a corporate handle and several employee handles – the best of both worlds. I’m still trying to figure that out for myself and my company. It’s not easy. If you haven’t already read it, there’s a great book that talks about this in more detail too, called Twitterville by Shel Israel.
Sanjiva,
A timely post for me! I’ve been struggling with a similar issue. I have a personal Twitter account with my face, and in November when I started a community blog, we made a Twitter account with the blog sunset for my avatar! I’ve been more active with the blog account but I’ve recently learned that, as you say, people don’t follow as much or like to communicate with sunsets as much as with people.
I went back and forth about what to do. I didn’t want to abandon the little branding I’d done for the blog because it’d become fairly recognizable, but I knew people prefer to talk to people. In the end I’m ending up doing double duty. If I follow someone, I do it with both accounts, and then if I want to Tweet or DM them, I’ll do it with the account with my face. It seems like it will work, but it is double duty! ~sigh ~ Still, I agree with you: … but I think I’d be missing out if I merged my accounts, or got rid of one.
Isn’t it fun!
Lori