Why can’t you get away with only tweeting about yourself? Twitter is an inherently self-centered platform. It’s a “look at this picture of the stir fry I’m making” kind of place. A lot of people watch how many celebrities use Twitter and assume that’s how they should be using it too. That’s bad. Don’t do that. People might care what sugary drink some D-lister ordered at the bar but they don’t care about the taco you just ate. Let’s figure how to have some more meaningful engagements.

Well what am I supposed to tweet about if tweeting about yourself is bad?

I feel so inspired!

— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) July 23, 2012

Like I alluded to above, people don’t generally care too much about empty fluff like this tweet from Ms. Kardashian. So what are you supposed to do instead? I like the Social Media Rule of Thirds by Amy Guth. To summarize, about a third of the time,just be you. This doesn’t mean instagramming the ham sandwich you just saw at the supermarket deli. It means sharing legitimately interesting information about yourself or brand and legitimately interesting pictures or video. Not fluff. Interesting.

About a third of the time, share information from other sources that is also relevant to your interests. For those of you who follow me on Twitter you’ll see that most of the links I share are not my own content but rather content that I found interesting. Doing this accomplishes two things: 1. Gives you more interesting stuff to share and 2. Helps you become a part of a community of people with similar interests.

For the other third of your time, post about your own work or your brand. Share your blog posts and do a little self promotion. If you want people to see the content that you’ve worked so hard to create, you’re going to have to share it with some people.

About balance

Very rarely do you ever just want to be one thing on Twitter. If you’re using Twitter to drive traffic to your blog or website, you can’t just tweet links to it all the time or people will get bored and unfollow you. Be a valuable member of the community. Converse with people who tweet about things you’re interested in. Be a real person. If you’re just on Twitter to connect with people who have similar interests, don’t just reply to them with “nice post!” all day, offer something more substantial. If you’re on Twitter in a strictly social manner, don’t just tweet about your meals, share something that’s actually interesting. The more engaging, interesting content people share, the bigger and stronger the community interested in that content slowly becomes. Be part of the solution! Not the boring, fluffy problem.

 

 

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