Twitter has been one of the key ingredients of my personal branding mix, and interacting with relevant others and adding value with my tweets the way I have sought to distinguish myself amongst the 3 million other Tweeterers in my country and gazillions elsewhere. Being included in the list of ‘70 Tweeterers that add more value‘ in Spain earlier this year was without question one of the highlights of my career and a vindication of my approach.
In my previous post, I established that my default policy is to follow back on Twitter and I underscored the importance of a sensible management of your Twitter account as the backbone of your ‘Me 2.0’ persona. I also made it clear that one always retains the right of admission, and that there would be cases where – given the personal branding we are trying to build – following certain accounts would be out of the question or simply would not make sense for our specific goals.
Today I would like to share with you the ten account types I do not, as a rule, follow back. They represent roughly 10% of the requests I receive. Needless to say I always check their profile and their latest tweets before making a snap decision (and you should too!). Here goes the list:
- Twitter accounts in a language I don’t understand
- Twitter accounts with an offensive picture, logo or profile message
- Accounts with no profile or introductory message
- Accounts with radical or extreme views in politics and/or religion
- Accounts with vulgar or insulting tweets where expletives are ubiquitous
- Multi-level marketing and pyramid selling accounts
- Exclusively promotional and/or uni-directional accounts that do not interact (unless they are celebrities or referents)
- Accounts that haven’t generated a single tweet
- Accounts with no picture, logo or image
- Accounts I instinctively feel uncomfortable with or that my intuition tells me I shouldn’t follow
Let me insist once more that this is in no way a prescriptive list or criticism against those of you who have built your personal branding with a different Twitter strategy. I look forward to the reasons why you agree or disagree with my list in the comments section.
