1: Starting with Twitter

The first thing that most people do is to look at what is going on before any participation begins and I would recommend this as a very easy and straightforward first step. However, I am going to cover this second.

The first thing is to encourage you to open some social media accounts in your name.

If you fail to do this small step first, it could become very frustrating for you later. It might appear that the Social Media sites do not work and are broken. Basically, unless you have an account, the service providers will keep badgering you untill you open one. You will not be able to see what is going on clearly untill you open an account. So give in, open an account, there is no harm in that.

It simply involves you spending about thirty minutes opening accounts at Linkedin.com, Twitter.com, YouTube.com and Facebook.com. There you are, you have all you need to get started! For the articles in this newsletter, you just need to set up a Twitter account – so you can come back to the rest later if you wish.

You will probably agonise a little over your profile. It may take a while to find a photograph that you are happy with too. The time investment is worth it. The concept is all about the personal web and as every one else has personal profiles, then it is important that you join the ranks. The very minimum is to upload a picture of yourself, preferably a closely cropped head shot with little or no visible background. The picture needs to be close enough so that people would recognise you!

The key to profile creation is common sense. Avoid putting up pictures of your children and avoid supplying personal details such as your home telephone number in your public profile. I don’t think you have too much to fear from the service providers, but still, apply a bit of caution. Remember who you work for and how they (customers) might view your profile. Try and make your profile reflect who you are. In any case, there is generally not a lot of space to write a large bio, although you can put your entire CV into Linkedin should you want to.

I would recommend initially that you supply the minimum and essential information to get started and that should include a photograph of you.
I have produced a video where you can watch me create a profile on Twitter.

To hammer this home: Not having a picture on your Twitter profile identifies you as someone who is new and probably not very active. Past experience would bear that out. So not having a picture in your profile will severely reduce the number of clicks and you will therefore have much less likelihood of getting replies or for many people to take notice of what you say or do.

There’s more, click through to the next step here.