Experiments With The New @CommonCraft Twitter Account

Playing the devil's advocate here but you've had your own personal account for 2 years and haven't used it a lot. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. So will having a company account make it better for you? Possibly not because maybe it isn't your preferred style of communication. In terms of company accounts I'm not a fan of interacting with people via their company account because I like to connect personally with who I am talking to. We do have a twitter account for the company I work for but only use it to make announcements and latest news. We don't use it to respond to queries because it would be too time consuming and the forum is the better place for that. I think that is a better use of a company twitter account. If people want assistance they know that if they contact me via my personal account (@suewaters) I'm always happy to help -- but that is because I enjoy using twitter. Another good use is as you mention using the RSS feed from search.twitter.com for trouble shooting and providing assistance to users. But once again I prefer to contact people using my own personal twitter account. I haven't been able to cope with Tweetdeck probably just me and find Twhirl the better option when set to slowly displaying each tweet at a time.

I'm struggling with this myself - I recently set up Twitter accounts for three of my blogs - each serves a different real estate market - and I initially thought that I would tweet from each one. Almost immediately after I wrote and published the respective blog posts announcing the new accounts for readers to follow, I realized the simple truth about Twitter from a (my) user's perspective - I don't want to follow a blog. I want to follow the person who writes the blog. So - I'm already considering abandoning my three new accounts and keeping the focus on my account - @JimDuncan - because I suspect readers/followers feel the same.

I followed a PR agency account, and some of the employees some time ago. I just had to stop follow them all because they tweeted the same links and blog posts at least one time each, resulting in me feeling spammed. So don't tweet the same content on both accounts. On another note, I also had to stop following a guy owning some sort of blogging service because he spammed links to to blogs on his service and announced that he was "live" (live web cam stream of him in front of his computer) several times a day. If you want to use twitter commercially, be careful with what and how often you update, people don't like to be spammed. :-)

I currently run 4 twitter accounts - personal, one each for my books, and one for a project I run. Each is used slightly differently and auto-tweet the corresponding blog feeds on everything but my personal account. I use twitterfox. It works fairly well, but it's a high maintenance process because the whole purpose is to communicate and monitoring replies to 4 accounts can be a challenge. But it's worth it. The people following me personal may, but may not, be interested in every single update on a restaurant I found closed, or a book we're offering for free. And the people following me professionally really don't care about what I overheard at the starbucks or all my goofy replies to friends. So I try and keep things separate (unless of course something very exciting is happening). One thing I have found is that my professional twitter accounts get better response if I pop in and make personal, fun, tweets on occasion.

Hi, Lee - SocialToo is another way to manage your account, auto follow, etc. I'm experimenting with it. I've tried to use @kegill as my personal account but it's also the account where I follow people I'm interested in, even if I've only met them once or only met them virtually. I feed WiredPen posts here, because it's my "personal" blog (even though there isn't a lot about my personal life there). I use @uspolitics to feed my About.com posts to Twitter -- and I should "talk politics" there but I don't have the, erh, haven't made the time to do that. Sometimes I'll tweet a politics post as @kegill but it's conscious, not auto-tweet. I also set up an account to follow educators, as an experiment, but I find I'm not making the time to read the tweets. There has to be another way to connect with educators. Finally, I set up @kathygill to claim my name, sorta, but mostly so that people can find me. :-) I'm torn between the "I follow people I know" model and the Guy Kawasaki "follow everyone to get critical mass" model. :-/

With all the plugs that wordpress, ezinearticles and facebook offer for twitter and updating it (and I am sure there are others) I've found I can go a few days without logging and still be making both personal announcements as well as blog updates and article notifications.

All this week, I've been playing around with Twitter. Twitter has brought internet communication to another level. Some see it as the next irc, some see it as a tumblelog, and others see it as one huge chat room. I think it's a bit more than all of these things, and it's really taking a step forward. Twitter comes from the same people who brought us Odeo. I really think they hit the nail on the head with this one. Twitter is becoming a very fun, and cool way to share what's going on, and to talk to all of your friends.

I need to try this.......twitter getting too hard.

do you use the same email from your different accounts or different email addresses? i have a few sites and i am trying to decide to put everything for each site under my email or use a unique email to keep everything separate and compartmentalized.

You mention that you do not use groups on tweetdeck. I found that it's a great way to organize the people that you follow.