Tweet tweet twoo – twitter and who to follow

The two big “business” social media websites are generally considered to be Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m sure most of you have a personal Facebook page, but a large percentage of other interpreters that I know use Twitter the most when it comes to talking about the industry. LinkedIn also gets a lot of usage but today let’s talk about Twitter.

The Twitter home “feed” will be full of posts from those that you “follow” but just who should you follow for your business strategy? Clients? Peers? Potential clients? I once read about there being two strategies – either to follow everyone possible or to be very selective.

There are merits to both of these strategies in my opinion. The “follow everyone” means that you get a wealth of information coming through your feed, you have an overview of a wide variety of clients, what peers are talking about and potentially a wide audience too for your own posts. However, this does mean filtering through a lot of information which is time-consuming. The “selective” approach means that you’ll have much more targeted content coming through, perhaps you’ll interact more with colleagues that you know well, and keep more up to date with recurrent clients. With this method however you could be missing out on meeting new colleagues, getting into more varied discussions and have less clients interacting with you.

I think that both of these strategies have their merit, but perhaps a meet-in-the-middle approach is best – follow key players from the sectors that interest you (nudge to Lara’s post from last week), keep in touch with colleagues that you know or that you have close connections to, and engage more with others.

What is your strategy when it comes to using Twitter, or other forms of social media for that matter? Do you re-post your tweets on LinkedIn or Facebook? Do you like engaging in conversations on Twitter? I think Twitter and LinkedIn can be great forums for discussion and showing our value to clients if used wisely.