Follow Me: How To Create A Personal Brand On Twitter

In the summer of 2009, I attended a dinner party which I will always remember because of what it taught me about Twitter. I joined Twitter on March 9, 2009 and I was so excited about it that I couldn’t sleep. I logged into Twitter first thing every morning, and I watched it constantly all day long. I attended this dinner party a few months after that, and all I could talk about when I was there was Twitter. The strange thing to me was that nobody at that party knew anything about it.

Talking to people about Twitter back then was like talking to a group of zombies. I immediately came home that night and wrote an article about how to explain Twitter to people who don’t get it, and it was my first viral article ever. Now, almost 4 years and over 126,000 tweets later, Twitter has become a major part of my personal brand.

We write a lot here on Bit Rebels about how to use Twitter for business, but what about using it to create your personal brand? Have you been able to do that successfully? My very dear Twitter friend, Dr. Sarah-Jayne Gratton (celebrity author and @grattongirl on Twitter), recently published another outstanding book. This one, called Follow Me: Creating A Personal Brand With Twitter, showcases many of the people on Twitter who you probably connect with each day. It tells their individual stories for how they were able to create their own personal brands using this powerful social networking tool.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sarah on Skype a few months ago, and she is as creative and insightful via voice as she is via text. About her inspiration for the book, she said, “The new social frontier provides opportunities that were previously impossible to obtain. We have the ability to listen to hundreds of conversations about our brands in real time. Consumers are online all day, every day, sharing and tweeting about how they feel. Sentiment is oozing out of every post, and we should not fear it. Instead, we should embrace it as the new lifeblood of branding. It’s personalities, not pitches that sell today. It’s not what you have to say to others that makes your brand successful, it’s what others have to say about you.”

If you would like more information about how to build a successful personal brand on Twitter, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of her latest book. It will teach you pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about personal branding on Twitter. Sarah and her husband, Dr. Dean Gratton (@grattonboy) will also be running a number of social media workshops across Europe in 2013. You can learn more about that on TeamGratton. In addition to all this, Sarah is also developing and tutoring an Executive MBA social media module for Glyndwr University in North Wales. I took a few pictures of the book this afternoon and put them below so you can get a better feel for what it’s all about. You can get a copy here on Amazon.