There’s been a growing trend lately amongst people that have more than one Twitter account: unwanted retweeting. Here’s something to keep in mind while you walk the line of multiple Twitter accounts.
The Accounts I’m Talking About
My target for this complaint is actually people just like me: I have a personal twitter account (@fredleblanc), which I use for my day-to-day things of what I’m doing, and then my “business” account (@suredev). I post my company announcements through this account because it’s more interactive than a broadcast email list, much more viral, easier to update and —possibly the most important of all — limits my wordiness.
The Problem
I’ve seen an increasing trend in the above-described users of retweeting their business’s company posts on their personal account — not just now and then, but virtually every non-replying post. These posts usually happens within minutes (and sometimes seconds) of one another.
The Thought
The joy of Twitter is that I can choose the users that I wish to follow, not be forced into faux-friendships just to appease acquaintances (like on some other popular social networking sites). It can be tempting to tap into the potential of your personal account’s following crowd of users for retweeting your business’s latest accomplishments or announcements, but there’s a good chance that they’re not interested.
If people (friends, family, followers) are interested in the things your company has to announce, they will follow your company’s Twitter name as well.
The people that love you so much that they follow both you and your business are getting hit twice with information. In other words: your biggest fans and are being hit with the largest burden. The signal-to-noise ratio of Twitter is dangerous enough, and doubling your posts just adds to that.
Sometimes the personal excitement about something you’ve accomplished at your business — launching a project, for example — is something you want to post about personally. Under this rule of etiquette (Twittiquette?) posting the same fact on both accounts is acceptable, but each should bring something new to the table.
For example, my company’s announcement is more matter-of-factly worded, like “Launched BobsWidgets.com!” Compare this to something more loosely offered from your personal account, such as “Finally just launched BobsWidgets.com! A lot of hard work, but well worth it. Go look!”
Same information, different insight.
Company delivery: fact. Personal delivery: friendly fact.
If you simply retweet every post your company makes, why would anyone bother following both names? Why should they?
This blog was too wordy. And so is twitter. I’m going to create super-twitter that requires you say everything you need to in one syllable or less. (Yes, or less. Don’t ask me how. I haven’t the time to explain. [Exactly.])
How will the system know its syllables, you ask? Easy. It’ll be super.
Comment by Steve — April 2, 2009 @ 3:01 pm
I’m one of those folks who have both a personal and a business twitter account. I believe, to this day, I’ve been fortunate/wise enough to not repost anything I’ve said using one of them over in the other… at least not word-for-word.
Comment by Marc Amos — April 3, 2009 @ 7:06 am
I’ve done that a couple times, but only when I’m pretty sure it would be of interest to people who follow my personal account but not my business account. I would expect anyone who follows both to unfollow if I did it on a regular basis.
Comment by Matt Wiseley — April 3, 2009 @ 8:55 am
I have both a personal and business twitter account. In the beginning I would RT business tweets on my personal account at about the same time but only to build up a following for the business account. Now I only RT business tweets once in a while and only when I think followers of my personal account would be interested.
Comment by Kirby Turner — April 3, 2009 @ 10:00 am
[...] Also, our news and announcement platform has changes from a custom-build CMS tool to Twitter (if you didn’t know already, we’re @suredev). I encourage you to follow us for the latest updates and for keeping in touch. Don’t worry, you won’t get flooded with messages, and I certainly won’t be retweeting my posts on my personal Twitter account. [...]
Pingback by Spinning Plates: Tales of a Small-Time Web Shop // Meet SureDev, v2* — April 4, 2009 @ 12:46 am
FWIW, I haven’t retweeted a single time since reading this. Much more fun putting my own spin on it (and attributing with a “via @username”). Thanks for the excellent post.
Comment by Adam Darowski — April 22, 2009 @ 9:18 pm