Please share

Twitter Strategy: Are You Using Twitter Efficiently

By jmacofearth On 07/30/2015 · Add Comment

Over the years I’ve learned to use Twitter differently. And during that time I’ve built a few accounts up to a nice following. My strategy is to keep the "streams" as pure as possible. People are not following my @jmacofearth account to learn about health and fitness or to hear the latest positive divorce story from my parenting blogs. Nope. If I understand brand and following these days, if the message is not on message it will be ignored. If I abuse my list by tweeting everything to everyone, I will risk turning off my followers, being muted, or even unfollowed.

But when I do have a post that cuts across all four of my accounts… Wow, that’s when the big numbers roll in. Some kind of combined reach of 35,000 tweeple. Again, I only do this when the post is relevant to each of my four streams.

On the left is my main account. I have been building and refining this account since the early days of Twitter. I’ve been an avid Twitter spam fighter. I am against scheduled or auto-tweets of any kind. And I believe that when you tweet you should be online incase someone replies. It *does* happen. Not often, these days, as Twitter is more of a broadcast network rather than a social or communication channel.

My main account has been through some transformations. As I was starting up my divorce blog about 5 years ago I would broadcast all of those posts to this main account. And while I had taken measures to make that first blog anonymous, it was easy to see, if you knew me, that it was me. A friend told me I was polluting my stream. I was broadcasting stuff that had nothing to do with my audience. Why did people follow me on Twitter?

I soon branched off and created the "divorce" stream on Twitter. And than I launched another blog about single parenting (aka divorce), this time, not anonymous. So I needed yet a third account. And finally, my fourth account is for my health and fitness blog.

If you’re writing about a lot of different topics in the course of your week or month, you might consider breaking out your content streams into separate Twitter accounts. It’s a bit harder to manage, and you do have to pay attention followers and following on these additional accounts. However the rewards, over time, are huge.

Today @jmacofearh has 20k+ followers. My two divorce accounts combined have 14k+ followers. And my fitness account has 800 followers. When I do write a post about physical and mental health I will occasionally broadcast to all 4 accounts at once. BOOM. Bigger reach, low irritation rate, and I’m growing each channel with its own set of followers.

I could not have added 10,000 "divorce" followers to my main account, ever. It would not have happened. But by breaking out that account several years ago, I have built a channel or "stream" that is interested in anything I have to say on the topic of single parenting, dating, divorce, and relationships. And I’m fairly certain no one in my marketing/tech account wants these things in my @jmacofearth account.

Split your content streams. And don’t ever cross the streams, unless you have a good reason. We all know what happens when you cross the streams.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2015/07/twitter-streams/