Three Challenges When Managing A Twitter Alter Ego

How many Twitter accounts do you have? I have three. Like most people I started with a single account for my own personal use. That’s the one that’s linked at the end of this article and it’s still my major one. But about a year ago, one of my clients asked me to create and manage a Twitter account for him, and that’s where some of my challenges started.

Finding Stuff To Tweet About

With my own Twitter account it was never a problem to find stuff to tweet about. I’m reasonably active on the site, read a lot of blogs in my field and other areas of interest and have a core group of interesting people to follow. When it came to tweeting for my clients, I had to start from scratch. While I was interested in the topic of travel, I wasn’t as plugged into it as I was into the writing field. To address this, I:

• subscribed to a Google Pack on travel to see which blogs I found interesting. Over the weeks, I gradually deleted those that didn’t appeal.
• Looked at lists of the top travel blogs to find blogs I could follow
• Used Twitter search and other search tools to find people who were posting about travel related keywords
• Found travel bloggers through JustTweetIt
• Subscribed to press updates in the field so I could keep on top of travel news

Updating The Account

Once I had a second Twitter account, I also faced the issue of how to update it easily while still managing my original Twitter account. Logging in and out of each account was quite unsatisfactory, so I went through a range of tools designed to allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Mashable’s got a great list of applications for managing multiple Twitter accounts.  Here are some of the web apps I have tried.

• Tweetlater (now SocialOomph) – this worked well, allowing multiple account management, keyword tracking, scheduled tweets and more
• Seesmic Web – This app made it really easy to manage multiple accounts, but did not include scheduling
• Brizzly – though perhaps not the best for business (no analytics and no scheduling), Brizzly does allow draft tweets and has a killer feature in letting you temporarily mute people who are tweeting on topics that don’t interest you.
• Hootsuite – perhaps the best of the lot, Hootsuite allows multicolumn view, scheduling tweets and, most importantly for business, URL tracking and analytics via its ow.ly system

A key function of any useful Twitter web client is the ability to segment your followers into groups. The business account I run has 50 per cent more followers than my personal account, which makes it a challenge to engage with everyone. Grouping makes it easier to keep up with the people you are most connected to.

Being Someone Else

The most challenging part of running a Twitter account for a client is being someone else. I’ve always found that being myself is the best way to engage blog readers and microblog followers, but microblogging for a client forces me to tweet about what they would consider important. I am always conscious that I am representing someone else. I am still myself, but an edited version of myself, as I focus on my client’s priorities rather than my own.  What challenges have you found when blogging for business?

Written by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online
Posted on October 8th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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