Logging into Twitter over the last few days, users are being prompted to update their profiles. According to the AP,
Twitter is encouraging people to allow their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to be included in the service’s search index.

Let’s be honest, this is more of a Twitter acquisition strategy than a Twitter service improvement. The more information Twitter has about its users, the more it can charge advertisers. Twitter may push out 50 million tweets every day, but after four years in business the blue birdie needs to make some bank.

Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips
We should still take advantage of the profile prompting. In fact, as spring promises to arrive sooner than later, we should do a sweep of all our social media profiles. Several of these tips were created with Twitter in mind, but I think that most can apply roughly to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and even social media platforms like Foursquare to a degree.

A | B | C
 Alwaysbeclosing2As much as I love that Glengarry Glen Ross scene, this does not represent always be closing. A, B, C stands for Avatar, Bio and Content/Conversation/Commercial.

  • Avatar: Use one! And preferably the avatar is a picture of you. I break this rule. Often. But the point is it reminds everyone that there is a real live person at the end of every tweet you send.
  • Bio: Twitter is reminding everyone to fill out their profile because in part not enough people have filled out their information. And if you look at the picture below, my first instinct is to NOT follow this person. No picture + no bio info + no tweets = no context and no real reason to follow them.

Fmot2

  • Content/Conversation/Commercial: This is also called the law of thirds. If you focus too much on just pushing out links to stuff or just on having conversations or only shamelessly self-promoting yourself, you won’t appeal to many potential friends/followers/contacts. A mix of all three is a well-received variety.

Don’t fret about getting it literally into thirds. But this is a helpful guide to keep your content streams as useful as possible.

Register Your Name
OK, this is a very niche tip and may only apply to Twitter. But if you go by handles like crazylegs25 or, uh, prblog, it pays to include your full name in your profile and/or register your full name account so people can find you. I use @kevindugan to do nothing other than push people to my @prblog account.

Better yet? Don’t even start down this schizo-branding road. Be yourself from day one. Trust me on this. As the line between personal and professional continues to blur online, it doesn’t make much sense anymore. In my defense, I started down this road eight years ago.

Profile Consistency
You may want to use every pose you paid for at Glamour Shots, but using one or two pics across profiles consistently helps people to recognize you. If you have a few specific interests or skills, be sure to use the same keywords across every profile. This makes it easier for like-minded people to find you in relevant searches. And by pushing each profile’s email alerts to one account you can be more organized and potentially more responsive when new friends find you.

Register at Directories, Create Lists
It really can be tough to find people on Twitter, hopefully their profile update prompt helps this in the long run. But for open-API social media sites, there are usually a few directories where you can register to be more easily found by like-minded folk. Sites like TweepML and Listorious also make it easy to create your own lists. I owe a ton of my followers from being included on lists.

Your social media profiles are the first moment of truth many will have with you/your personal brand. Profiles have to do a lot of work and you’re not around to provide context. Are your profiles doing you justice?

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