The Twitter Do’s: Build A Powerful Personal Brand One Tweet At A Time

There are three important things to remember when engaging other people on Twitter. First, they want to be a part of the group and feel popular. Second, they want to have a good time and be entertained, and third, they want to be acknowledged and recognized. If your “tweets” meet the needs of your target audience, then you’ll be well on your way to growing your followers naturally and building a powerful personal brand online.

Keeping this in mind, here are six “do’s” for best using Twitter to build your brand:

Twitter Do #1: Be Interesting - It’s fine to tweet about what you’re doing or what you had for lunch, as long as you do it in a way that’s entertaining to your followers. Twitter is considered micro-blogging (you have 140 characters to get your point across), so if all you do is give a play-by-play of your daily mundane activities, you will lose followers fast. However, if you find a way to incorporate a little humor, a little of the unusual or something off-the-beaten-track, you’re much more likely to engage and amuse. If someone reading your tweet thinks, “wow, I know what she means!” or gets a good chuckle out of it, you will never be lacking followerers. Not every post has to be funny or clever, but when you are sharing your insights and happenings, try to make it interesting.

Twitter Do #2: Be Informative – Not every tweet has to answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” As a participant in the Twitter community, you have daily opportunities to give something back. Post links to helpful articles or tweet bits of advice and information. Including educational tweets as a part of your repertoire is an effective way to add value and variety. You’ll know if you’re on the mark because you’ll get positive feedback in the forms of replies, re-tweets (RT) and direct messages.

Twitter Do #3: Be Helpful and Interactive – If someone posts a question, reply with a thoughtful response. Send out links to articles that would be helpful to your target audience. And re-tweet (RT) relevant information, tips, ideas and insights. Re-tweet others when they post tweets you like and want to share with your audience. The more you help others, the more they will want to help you, so re-tweet generously. Twitter is a conversation, not a monologue, so the more you engage and participate, the more successful your relationships will be.

Twitter Do #4: Promote With Care – It’s fine, and even advisable, to promote your own work, just as long as it’s not all you’re doing. Take the time to introduce links to your blog posts in a thoughtful and interesting way. Mention something that you’re working on and even ask for a bit of advice.

Twitter Do #5: Variety is the Spice of Life – If all you do is promote yourself, people will tire of you and you will quickly lose followers. If all you do is update your mundane daily happenings, people will get bored and disinterested. No one is that important or that interesting. Balance and variety are key. Tweet with a healthy mix of personal, business, informative, quirky (or funny, if you have the gift) and helpful.

Twitter Do #6: Be On Brand – Twitter allows you to build relationships relatively quickly. Use this opportunity to share information about your area of expertise – give away valuable tips and ideas that your target audience might be able to use immediately. Constantly remind yourself of your brand attributes and express them with your tweets. For example, if one of your brand attributes is to inspire, then perhaps you will want to tweet an inspiring quote every day. Or you can send out links to inspiring stories. If you Twitter often enough in a targeted way, your followers will start associating you with a particular attribute or area of expertise.

The winning strategies for building your brand on Twitter are to consistently provide value and engage your target audience in an interesting way. If you are a small business owner and you’re not tweeting, you’re missing out on a worldwide virtual networking event that’s at your fingertips 24/7. It gives you the opportunity to build your brand, stay informed, drive traffic to your website and attract new clients 140 characters at a time.

© Liz Dennery Sanders 2009