Wait, You Have How Many Twitter Accounts?!

@ConchRaider on Twitter asked the question the other day:

and I replied:

Why that many??? Most people asked me (after they get over the initial shock that someone actually has 12 twitter accounts. Actually it’s a bit more than that. I recently added another one. Or two…)

I grabbed twitter handle names for various business ventures that I currently have and am in the planning process to launch. It costs *nothing* for you to get a twitter handle and once you got it, it’s yours until you cancel the account. So why not protect your business name?

Additionally, actually, for me, twitter is an experiment, like how I treat all the social networks that I am on. Social networks, as its name implies –> it’s social, it’s fun and it’s networking.

We all belong to different types of networking groups, you may be in a cancer group because you lost your loved one to cancer. Or you may be in a business group that is specifically for women’s economic independence, because you are a woman business owner seeking economic independence. Or you may be in a Boston Terrier meetup group because you love BTs.

Photo Courtesy of Duncan Scott's Facebook photo

(I’m sorry, how can you say no to a cutie like this???)

And every group has a different type of audience and demographics. We always say, being in small business (or real estate), you never know where your next lead will come from. So segmenting your social networks online is just another way to expand your networks by your interests online.

So I am doing it with twitter. I’ve started to segment tweets according to each type of audience & business ventures that I have. For example, I also teach green training, so @greenretraining is all about green news, tips, conferences, etc. And obviously, my bio for @greenretraining is different:

“green real estate trainer in san francisco bay. tweet most of the time as herself @cindeelean. vows to reduce waste, plastic, green washing in real estate”

vs. my personal bio on @cindeelean:

“social media addict, real estate home stager, entrepreneur, beer drinker, lover, thinker, doer, occasional snorer, treehugger, faster talker, always munching”

Frankly I was pleasantly surprised and shocked by this @greenretraining account. Because once I grabbed the handle, I completely forgot about it since I also grabbed other handles like “sfgreentraining,” “regreentraining,” etc. So I set up the account in late January, 2009 and after checking back couple months later, much to my surprise, the account had followers! Not only followers, I had several hundred followers without one single tweet! I had no link, no photo, no nothing, just a plain bio.

I thought: “hmmm, what the heck.” When I checked the other green real estate related handles that I grabbed, their follower numbers were dismal. So guess what? I picked @greenretraining for the permanent home of my green tweets.

I also don’t monitor this account much at all until I saw that the account followers reached about 800. I was like.. hmm.. perhaps it’s time to write something. Because I mainly tweet and interact with tweeple via @cindeelean, one account is already a lot of interactions, let alone another one (that’s why the others haven’t gotten that much love at all).

Plus I simply don’t have that much to say for all my 12 accounts, so every time I see a green tweet, I retweeted (RT) it as @greenretraining. Next thing I know, I started getting replies (@), direct messages (DM) and even #followfriday shoutouts. (I was floored when I saw that.. I was like, me? People want to follow me for #followfriday?)

I still don’t do much except RT on @greenretraining, although now I do started to interact with others more when people DM and @ me on @greenretraining. The account continues to receive steady growth, although it has slowed down comparing to its beginning.

Here is a graph from TwitterCounter.com. As you can see, the account gets new followers everyday. You know, for 175 updates, 1200 followers is pretty darn amazing.

What did I learn from this @greenretraining account experience:

Think about optimizing your bio with keywords that are searchable and industry specific if you are tweeting for business. Obviously for my personal account, I don’t care for followers, and it is a personal account, so I write about me: I like to eat, therefore “always munching on something.” I like beer (a little too much. They go straight to my gut.), so I wrote “beer lover.” I also occasionally snore (Although I’ve never heard it, so my mom tells me.), so “occasional snorer.” Okay, these are keywords that no one would really search for, so I won’t get new followers from the bio really, except beer breweries searching for new fans.
It can serve as marketing research to find the best name your potential consumers will latch onto: When I was thinking up green twitter handles, I really just thought of potential ones that can work and so potential competitors will use. But what I didn’t realize is that your audience will react to the titles differently. This reminds me of Tim Ferriss’s story about how he picked a book cover for his bestseller Four Hour Work Week. He went to the Palo Alto Borders and put the potential book covers onto books at the display and see which one people would pick up. In a way, you are market testing your audience to see which one they responds to better.
Different demographic can behave very differently: My 85-year-old neighbor calls people like me “green weenies.” He’s lived next to my parents for about 12 years and we never really chatted. When I was checking mail for my parents the other day, he happened to be at his driveway, and I walked over and said hello. I had no idea that he is an avid hunter. And he showed me. He opened up his garage and there were deer, caribou, antlers of various sizes hanging up all over his garage. ALL his “trophies” from hunting. I was like WOW. I have never seen this before. (Apparently his wife doesn’t want him to put them in the house, so his garage becomes his “man-cave.”) He even had a bear! And an alligator next to it!
People in the green industry does stick together and try to be as supportive of each other as possible. People are generally nicer as well. Everyone is super kind and supportive and LOVES (or obsesses) about being green. So once you put those signals out, people do search for people based on keywords to follow. With @greenretraining, I grew a completely different set of contacts from my regular personal account @cindeelean which is really for my own daily amusement and ranting (and some real estate too..).

Here are a few of other twitter accounts that I tweet from, as you can see, those don’t get as much love right now since I haven’t had time to developed individual accounts

@staged4more: my home staging company Staged4more’s official channel

@swiftrepro: literally born today. The mother company of everything I do at work

@biztechday: an annual tech conference designed for small business owners & entrepreneurs. During the 2-day conference, we have workshops and discussions on leveraging technology tools for business owners and start-ups. We also included a non-profit track this year. You can visit BizTechDay website for more info. Or follow BizTechDay on twitter.

and oh yeah, I also signed up one for @smallbizgurl* today as well.