Follow Me! Creating a Personal Brand with Twitter

Chapter 2

‘Less’ Is the New ‘More’

“Would you have been so brief with him, he would have been so brief with you; to shorten you.”

King Richard II

When I was first asked to comment on how much Twitter has contributed to the rise of the personal brand, a particular quote immediately sprang to mind; a quote usually attributed to Mark Twain, although actually written by Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

It’s a profound and an oh so true statement about how Twitter has been able to boil down content to its true core message — and the same is true for your brand and its core message.

Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff

These days, information is fast-flowing and constant, and it has become increasingly hard to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of what adds value to both my businesses and myself. I find lengthy articles best saved for those bedtime reading moments that increasingly never seem to come, as all too often I fall into bed in the wee small hours, when reading is the furthest thing from my exhausted mind.

It is a scientifically proven fact that how we read content has changed due to the evolution of how information reaches us and the speed with which it does so. And the change isn’t a recent one. As far back as 1997, Jakob Nielsen of Alertbox was researching the way that people read web pages. What he discovered is that, in ...