Growing your Personal Brand By Connecting Twitter to the Real World
April 22, 2010 | By Matt Rogers
There are two types of tweeple in this world: Celebrities and non-celebrities. If you’re Conan or Ashton and you’re a twilebrity, you won’t have any trouble finding followers. Same goes for guys like Matt Cutts and Copyblogger, big names and Twitter captains in their field.
For these guys Twitter is a bona fide marketing channel, one that came from a previously minted fame or celebrity, not the other way around. Conan noted in his super funny sit down at Google that the “Legally Funny on TV” tour was sold out with one Tweet, which pointed people to a website. One free and all powerful Tweet.
If you’re Joe Tweep you don’t have the opportunity to leverage Twitter to capitalize on your already established fame because you aren’t famous. In this case the road to a meaningful following is going to be arduous and winding, and — if not done properly — may not be worth it at the end of the day.
The easy option is to solve your non-celebrity by gaming the system. There are sites out there that allow you to pay or trade for followers, like boosttwitterfollowers.com, where you become a VIP member, and you essentially pay to follow people who promise to follow you back (I haven’t tried it) for as little as $49.99 per month.
The problem with this and other spammy services is that regardless of the faux-credibility received from the size of your following, there’s still no brand. Yeah you might have 100k followers, but who are those people? Why are they following you? If 99 percent of those followers were brokered, then all you’ve got is a very large and very soulless following. No brand means no trust, that no one will re-tweet or connect with you in a meaningful way that will result in more business.
The real means to a legitimate Twitter following is through hard work and networking. Good followings are grounded in real people in real communities, as you likely have with your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, where you know the people and they are likely to comment or Like what you’re doing.
For Tweeple who aren’t concerned with celebrity but still want to use Twitter as a business tool, you’ll need to find a community of tweeple and establish legitimate two-way relationships. And the best way to ensure your followers read and retweet your tweets is to meet them in person.
