S. Cohen is a writer and Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY. He is @obilon on Twitter (
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There are plenty of strategies for approaching Twitter. It’s getting more complex each day, but in the end it can be boiled down to a few simple approaches.
From Twittering on behalf of yourself to Twittering for a company, playing the part of a classic character to being a robot, here are seven ways users approach Twitter.
Introduce yourself and tell us about your Twitter approach in the comments.
1. You are yourself
You are on Twitter for the community, the knowledge you get and give, and the sharing of resources – whether it’s for professional or purely personal reasons. Twitter is your communication device.
I can go on all day providing examples of people who Twitter for their own enjoyment or just business networking but not specifically to promote anything or anyone in particular. Here are a few of my favorites that I follow:
@john_hunter – He’s a writer from England who frequently just tweets what’s on his mind.
@MaryKnudson – A professor from a prominent school who really just enjoys having good conversations and sometimes helping people get connected.
@amykchulik – The best friendships on Twitter came from out of the blue. @amychulik and I have been tweeting for months on a number of subjects and I can’t remember for the life of me how we connected. I’m just glad we did.
@jpage – She’s a twenty-something online marketer here just for sharing and networking. We used to work together and barely got out of there alive, but we survived to tweet another day.
2. You have a personal brand
You might use Twitter under an assumed or enhanced personality and stick to a strategic plan. It’s not necessarily as insidious as it sounds, it’s just that you are your own business and you need to promote it in a certain way, with a certain angle. You pay close attention to the things you say so they align with how you want the public to perceive you, and even in times when you share personal information it only goes to further the identity you’ve fostered online.
Whatever the reason you tweet, at the end of the day, it’s to sell yourself as an expert in a particular field or to promote your products and services. Some people’s true online personalities are so unique and so attached to what they do they become unintentional personal brands.
@garyvee – I can’t go a day without imagining Gary jumping up and down in one of his videos telling me that I’m so totally awesome. Is it live? Or is it Vaynerchuk?
@BadAstronomer – Before he was on Twitter, he was a one-man brand, defying Moon landing deniers and shedding light on myths about the universe. He’s still up to his old tricks.
@henican – He’s a Newsday columnist and a Fox News political analyst and a Talk Radio Network host and… A Cartoon Network voice? His tweets are high concept mini-columns that perfectly capture his sensibilities, his humor and his voice.
3. You work for a corporate brand
You Twitter for a company that has its own history and values. Your own personality or interests rarely if ever leak into the Twitter feed, and usually it’s only if they are perfectly aligned to the brand’s strategy.
For example, you might talk and share opinions about social media itself but you’d stay far away from political discussions. Your main intent on Twitter is to advance the culture, the message and the products and services of the company that employs you. Your personality may be of a spokesperson, a brand name or even a remotely controlled rover on the fourth planet from the sun.
@shirleybrady – She’s the BusinessWeek.com community editor and a little bit of an exception to the rule. But for the most part she’s all business.
@ScottMonty – Less an exception to the rule, Scott, head of social media at Ford Motor Company generally stays on track when it comes to tweeting about Ford vehicles.
@comcastcares – As Director of Digital Care Frank Eliason’s job is to make you feel that a big cable company can be touchy-feely and your problems do matter to them.
4. You’re a fictional character or dead historical person
You are a real person but your Twitter account is entirely dedicated to promoting a character in a story, tweeting as someone from history or as a new character created just for Twitter.
@R2D2 – As the original tweeter, R2D2 is one half of the most famous robotic duo in the universe. After saving the galaxy from the evil Empire, he’s just building his network and tweeting about the old times with the Skywalker family.
@cdarwin – Charles Darwin was the 19th Century naturalist who turned the world on its ear with his book “The Origin Of Species,” proposing that random mutations and natural selection were the drivers of the diversity of life on earth.
@GeneHunt – He’s gruff, he’s offensive and he degrades women. He’s also on Twitter. @GeneHunt is the Twitter persona of Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, a character in the UK version of Life on Mars and the spin-off Ashes to Ashes.
@joan_holloway – Somehow a sexy office manager from an ad agency from more than four decades ago has embraced Twitter. And I’m not all that upset about it. Joan Halloway is a character from the wildly entertaining show Mad Men that takes a look at the culture of ad agencies and relationships between men and women in the 1960s.
5. You’re literature
Even more specific is exclusively Twittering out a story or some poetry or something of the like. Some have tried to use it as a true publishing platform 140-characters at a time, either with short stories that fit within a tweet or as an ongoing series of tweets that will make up a longer piece.
@smallplaces – A novel entirely on Twitter called “Small Places” written by N. L. Belardes.
@twitterfiction – Original works of 140-character fiction. Like a publishing company on Twitter, they take submissions for original work to tweet.
@arjunbasu – It’s not easy to put so much irony and wit into 140-character short stories, but he does it. Called “twisters,” they always have some sort of twist in the end.
6. You are a robot
You are not really a person at all. You are a bot. I’m a science fiction fan. I’m all for the rights of robots and all that, but in the world we live in bots are not exactly the highly developed neural networks that will eventually take over the world as predicted by the Singularity or the Terminator series of films. For now, if you just use Twitter to promote content that is produced elsewhere and that process is automated, then you just might be a robot.
@NYTimes – All the news that’s fit to Tweet. Yeah, I said it.
@CNN – Cable news channel embracing and succeeding on Twitter.
@Newsweek – A national magazine trying to reinvent itself. Stories are fed into a Twitter stream.
7. You’re a blend
Like most things in life, Twitter is not black and white. Many Twitterers are a blend of the above designations. I think that Twitter is more fun when people mix it up a little, putting a personal and relaxed conversational tone to their stream even if they are there to promote a brand, whether it’s personal or corporate.
@ariherzog – He’s an online media strategist for business and government cultivating his personal brand. But what he does best is chat about a variety of topics from my Star Wars addiction to the best ways a business can use Twitter. Ari is an occasional contributor to Mashable ().
@NeilDiamond – Sweet Caroline! The Jewish Elvis is on Twitter. Guess what? He’s not doing such a bad job. While he’s clearly a brand name, he’s quite honest and open in his tweets. This is one celebrity that actually feels more real and is more endearing on Twitter.
@balmeras – She used to work for The National Wildlife Foundation blogging and Twittering about children, education and the outdoors. Now she’s doing the same thing on her own terms and having lots of fun doing it. But when she’s not promoting her new blog and things you should be doing with your kids, you can find her just shooting the breeze.
@jojeda – Tech writer and author of a book on Twitter. (What else?) He’s sometimes wearing his journalism hat but mostly just tweeting about stuff and having good conversations, in English and Spanish!
What do you think?
The above examples are by no means hard and fast rules to using Twitter. Some people might say there is no such thing as a Twitter strategy and the very idea itself is anathema to the site. But we like to group people into neat categories. (Which probably explains why Psychology 101 is a favorite elective of undergraduates.) There are probably as many ways to group people as there are Twitter users themselves.
Have I left anything out? If so help out by adding to this list of approaches to Twitter in the comments below.
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