Follow Me! Creating a Personal Brand with Twitter

Chapter 19

Twitter to the Power of Two

“Relationships and engagement are today’s new currency”

#TeamGratton

There’s something about Twitter that brings people together, and it’s not just on a personal branding level. I can personally vouch that it has also enriched my marriage.

Starting out on Twitter as @grattongirl was very much an experiment for me in social networking, one that I never anticipated would take me so far in such a short space of time. Within months of joining, I was well and truly hooked and found myself talking incessantly about the platform to my husband Dean who, at the time, wasn’t really into “the social networking thing,” as he called it back then.

But I guess my enthusiasm paid off. Eventually Dean decided to take a closer look at the platform I couldn’t get enough of. He initially signed up as @Dean_Gratton and promptly announced, “I don’t get it!”

“Just hang in there,” I told him with firm assurance, knowing that he was about to throw in the Twitter towel. He shrugged his shoulders in begrudging affirmation and asked me in an ambivalent tone, “So what do I do now?”

I explained to him what I had discovered myself: That Twitter wasn’t all about idle breakfast food chitchat, but was a powerful search tool and a great identifier of news and connections in my respective arenas. “Try out the search feature,” I prompted. “Use the words ‘Bluetooth,’ ‘wireless,’ ...