Or, “how I ditched the robot and became a real person on Twitter…”

Is a picture worth a thousand tweets? Quite possibly

I loathe seeing pictures of myself appearing in the public domain. Vain enough to do vanity searches, realistic enough to recognise that I’m not particularly photogenic, I’ve chosen in the past to use meaningless alias pictures wherever possible.

When I set up my Twitter account I used one of my favourite pictures of a wind-up robot holding up a pencil (see below) for my profile picture – it expresses how I feel some days!

This remained for over a year of intermittent and non-strategic Twitter usage, during which time I picked up 280 followers who were happy to follow my occasional rants about Google News, blatant RTs of press releases and WebCertain news, along with the odd, daft discussions about celebrities and ancient pop music.

Like many people with a corporate, yet personal, Twitter profile my Tweets are somewhat random, despite the advice I would give anyone – you must define what you are about on Twitter and stick to it!

I could have ruthlessly pursued building up more followers by keywording my Tweets and following the key influencers in my sector, but, really life is too short…

One simple step has made my follower numbers jump up in just a few days.

I’ve deleted the cute robot and replaced it with a real picture of myself. It’s a rather simpering pose, but I still feel  safe in my anonymity as it’s fairly heavily photoshopped – yet it is still a recognisable human (female) face and it is encouraging more people to follow me.

In four days of continuing with my unexciting and infrequent Tweeting, I picked up just over 20 new Twitter followers. In the old days of the robot, I would have maybe found 5 more people following me.

Interestingly, a number of people who I kind-of-know from conferences and the search marketing sector are now following me. I haven’t targeted anyone, I haven’t changed any other details on my profile page and I even Tweeted in French at one point… (I am not French).

Pretty obvious stuff maybe, but the rule seems clear –

If you are a corporate Tweeter – use a company logo
If you are a person (with a name) – use a picture

Whatever you do, don’t choose a robot for your profile picture…

Jenny Simpson old Twitter profile picture