With a limited scope of just 140 characters a tweet, you could be forgiven for thinking that Twitter offers equally limited scope for communicating your business or personal brand.  If your brand is all about being endlessly verbose, you're probably right.

But it's a rare (as hen's teeth) brand that benefits from waffle so perhaps Twitter provides a useful exercise in finding ways to trim your brand communications to nutshell size.

Think about...

What you tweet about: Do you stay purely business or do you let some personal stuff through? Do you keep close to home or cover industry news too? Do you tweet about news, information, quirky related virals...?

How often you tweet: Too little and you run the risk of making little impact, too much and you need to be useful/informate/entertaining to maintain your relevance to your followers.

Your tone of voice: An important part of conveying your brand in written and spoken channels and, indeed, it's a challenge to get it right in such small chunks but think about being consistently professional, funny, irreverent, dry, enthusiastic, calming... whatever your brand values intend.

Who you hang out with: It's tempting to get excited about the quantity of your followers but their quality is important too. I don't hold back from blocking and reporting anyone who looks like they're spamming.  Anyone relevant, interested and/or interesting is welcome to follow me though so please do.

By the way, has anyone else had to overcome the aversion to the Twitter terms "following" and "follower"? It still makes me think of "gurus", and that's not really part of my brand.

Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd, Nottingham
Francine on Twitter