Three Faces of Personal Profiles: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

In replying to a comment on my "Book Marketing" LinkedIn group, I wanted to use the person's name to clarify to which comment I was responding.

Only there was no person's name. Yet again someone had missed the point of LinkedIn profiles, which are listed under PEOPLE.

A LinkedIn profile should be a person's name and personal professional information. Then a person can create a COMPANY profile for his/her company. And these are listed under COMPANIES in LinkedIn.

In a private message I sent this explanation to the particular company and added that the same is true of Facebook. When people join Facebook they must first create a personal profile in their own name. Then they can create a Facebook Page for their company, their book, their brand, their cause, etc.

Now we come to Twitter. Twitter works the opposite. You can choose any Twitter username you want (that is available). It can reflect almost anything – your company, your book, etc. – although it should NOT be the name of a famous person or famous brand if you aren't that famous person or famous brand.

But when it comes to the NAME field of the Twitter profile info, if you are an individual or an individual representing your company, it is more "social" to put your own name rather than the name of your company or repeat the Twitter username.

I DMed this additional info to the person from my "Book Marketing" group. I got back a DM that several people tweeted on the company account so that no one person's name could be put in the NAME field.

I responded in a DM by sending the link to the Twitter account of the Staples team. This is an excellent example of how to make a company's Twitter account "personal" even if several people are tweeting on the same account.

Check out this example now at http://twitter.com/#!/staplestweets and note how the different people use their initials after their tweets so that it is clear who is tweeting what.

Hats off to @staplestweets – I wish more companies having multiple people using an account would follow this "social" example.

P.S. If you're interesting in book marketing, visit my open "Book Marketing" LinkedIn group.



© 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company Miller Mosaic, LLC, which offers "done for you" and "do it yourself" social media services at www.millermosaicllc.com/services/

Information about Phyllis' fiction books and ebooks is available on her Amazon author page at http://budurl.com/PZMAmazon