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…

The development of design, content, links, networking and media coverage of social media has improved enormously, it’s well documented and new innovations are continually being introduced. Social networking is a phenomenon I never thought I would get into, never mind checking my profile and searching for friends regularly, this was more so when I first signed up.

Online profiling on such networking sites as, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter or any type of blogging sites will enhance and develop your profile across the web, depending of course on your privacy settings. Content quality and use of keywords all effects how you rank in search engines, such as Google.

The following selection of tips may enhance your visibility and optimization…
1. Include good quality content
2. Utilise any links to other sites you blog on etc
3. Update your blog / social networking site regularly
4. Use keywords to enhance ranking capabilities.

Over the past few months my colleagues have been talking about Twitter, I didn’t really want to join another social network, (having one I thought was enough work for me), and a couple of months ago I decided I had had enough and finally gave in.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I have benefited from joining Twitter – from a work/industry perspective anyway. As I mentioned in an earlier entry I am fairly new to the world of PR and SEO, following people on Twitter who have much experience and sharing links / articles on related topics has helped me immensely.

I often find with social networking some can people become obsessed over it, depending on whether it’s used for social or business purposes…. Is it ok to be obsessed with it? What do you think? Am I alone with this perspective? And have you tried typing your name in Google to see where / if you rank?