I’m going to be completely honest with you. I failed epically when it came to monitoring two Twitter accounts.

I would have liked to come back with this massive success story… Shown you all that it just takes a little bit of effort and consistency to build a following from scratch.

Yeaaaahh…. no. It didn’t work out that way.

For those of you unfamiliar with my second-account-saga, I started another blog called This New Town, to chronicle my “adventures” (re: attempts to settle) in New Zealand.

To help promote this blog without annoying my already existing Twitter followers, I started a second account.

Tweets were about where I was going, what I was doing and how I was coping.

To keep this from turning into a book, here’s what I did wrong:

1. I segmented my audience.
2. I didn’t know my audience.

Don’t Segment Your Audience

Listen, I’ve said this before and for some reason I ignored my own advice. You are your own brand. Unless you’re a news site or a blog with multiple authors, people come back because of YOU. Your voice, your stories. It’s the same thing with Twitter. Just because you’re a social media blog doesn’t mean you can’t tweet about the weather, your dog or that weird rash. In fact, you SHOULD tweet about your personal stuff. That’s the whole point. Connecting.

Young House Love recently posted about breastfeeding even those John and Sherry blog religiously about home improvement. Part of the same niche? No, not really. Part of their hugely successful brand? Hells to the yes.

Know Your Audience

I’ve avoided writing about this topic since moving to Auckland because it’s a small, cliquey city, but social media is on an entirely new plane here. The group of people using Twitter is smaller, but they use it in such a different way. It’s more about talking to friends you already have, not making new ones.

So I started this new profile, trying desperately to connect with Auckland people, not realizing I wouldn’t get a response out of them because no one had any established connection with me.

It was a long, tortuous, and highly frustrating process.

Point Being….

Because I was so desperate to fit into this niche and so worried my Auckland-centric tweets would annoy my previously-established followers, I segmented myself, therefore alienating really interesting people on Twitter. And because New Zealand tweeting is so different from what I’m used to, growth was seriously limited.

Meaning? Unless you really have to, one Twitter profile is enough.

I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts are, if you’ve had success or failure with maintaining two personal accounts. I might have given up a tad too early, but in my gut it was definitely the right decision.

{Super-secret-secret: There might be some combining of the blogs in the near future. But don’t worry, I’ll poll the shit out of you before I do.}

Tagged as: blogging, online, personality, This New Town, twitter