OK, I have a Twitter account. Now what?

The thing about Twitter is to distinguish the networking from the business marketing. There certainly is value in using twitter for business as a business but a business is much about connections and interactions between people. It is a paradigm shift (I don’t use that phrase willy nilly). Twitter is an interaction space for two or more people. I started on Twitter as smashingred but because Twitter is beyond silo marketing and about making the connections and sharing experience between individuals it is important to make it as human as possible. People might have a personal interaction with @comcastcares or @davefromdell, @smashingred or @modxguru but not in the same way they have it with @JayGilmore or @shanesponagle. If you are using your twitter account for business purposes by all means create an account but it’s interactions will be different and people will react and follow it differently than a real person.

I will tell you flat out i will NOT follow people with names of businesses or websites unless I care about their business or am a fan of their product or service but I will almost always follow individuals from a company I like like @SaulColt from Freshbooks, @LeoLaporte from TWiT, or @garyvee from winelibrary.tv. They are the real people as the real people.

But how do you manage protecting your brand name on Twitter? Do you register your business id just to keep it from being used by others?

Go to http://www.twitter.com/smashingred

That is somewhat extreme but you can use the business account for certain business activities or related stuff. Then feed that stuff to your twitter widget on your website.

OK, I see. This is starting to make some sense.

I looked at the terms and the only clause slightly related to Twitter Squatting would be this:

We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Thanks dev_cw for starting this thread it has been most useful, and thanks Jay for the insight on twitter theres still a lot to learn but I can see this becoming a very useful tool.

I’ve reserved my brand: http://twitter.com/Onesmarthost which links to my main twitter account.

Aaron.

This is very interresting, I had some problems figuring twitter out at first until Jay helped me (I had missed the search feature which is key to the twitter experience). It doesn’t generate business yet for me, in France.

I for one chose to use my forum pseudo, and created 2 accounts since I tweet both in french and english, thus davidm_en and davidm_fr pseudos (Not every french follower reads english and definitely few english followers read french ).

Now you got me thinking I should switch to DavidMolliere and DavidMolliere_en

Only thing is, when you change name, your followers have to follow you again or is it still linked to the same account ?

So long as you change your davidm_en your followers will only see the different name. Twitter’s wisdom was in keeping usernames separate from account ids. When I changed my smashingred account to JayGilmore people noticed the difference in name but all my followers and followees remained the same.

The only thing that I had to adjust was services that were tied to my username like Tweetdeck; I needed to logout and log back in and unfortunately groups were lost and needed to be rebuilt so this may be a problem for some. Any feeds to friendfeed or Facebook etc will need changing also.

Cheers,

Jay

Thanks folks, this post turned out to be very helpful in getting my feet wet in Twitter. As a result:

1) I have ’registered’ my real name as well as my brand name, but will use the personal name as my Twitter presence.
2) I have downloaded Twiterific as my desktop Twitter app
3) I am following a few people, mostly MODx people but I will look for some outsiders as well
4) Thanks to you people I have a few followers which makes me feel important (and a little pressured to Tweet something)
5) No real photo for now. I will try it out with my aavatar first and see how personal it gets before putting my face out there.

I am still not 100% sure how this will fit into my daily life, so i will mess around and see what happens. Thanks Jay for your insight.

One thing I can’t figure out is: How do you follow ’topics’? Is this a standard Twitter feature or is this something 3rd party?

Thanks Jay for the input
Will proceed to change ASAP then !

There are some interresting modx discussions on twitter

Anyone here used TweetDeck and Twitterrific that can compare the two?  I’m using TweetDeck for the moment, but am considering trying out Twitterrific.  In particular, the Twitterrific support of multiple accounts was intriguing, but I’m curious if anyone has any other +’s or -’s in their experience with both of these...