What’s Your Twitter Personality?

The social media site, Mashable is just invaluable for letting me know — in a very un-wonky, non-techie way — what I need to understand about digital and social media. Today, for instance, their headline story is “Most Fortune 500 Companies Don’t Get Twitter.”

What caught my eye is the last sentence: that big companies don’t “display any personality in their tweets.”

Big business may be able to get away with being bland but small business can’t. If you are going to spend the time and resources to use social media in the first place, especially Twitter, then you absolutely positively unfailingly have to have a style, a recognizable voice and character, a PERSONALITY in order to stand out from your competition, not to mention build your followers and your fans.

• What constitutes a Twitter personality?
• A great picture. Not your dog or your nursery school wallet snapshot.
• Original material — it’s great to retweet, but only if it absolutely has bearing on your business and your industry. Do not do what so many Tweeters do these days –simply regurgitate other’ people’s stuff.
• Be contrary, be funny, be thoughtful and have something to say.
• Point your followers towards sites or posts that you’ve found particularly useful and tell them why.

Ask yourself whether what you’ve written about is just same old/ same old or if it truly adds to the conversation that you’re having with your customers, clients and friends. If you’re on the fence, wait until you have something add.