Deranged Penguin

Developing a following is a tricky thing. On the one hand, as I said in my lens on the subject, it is important to consider yourself a channel when you’re thinking about Twitter marketing. On the other hand, that sort of thinking inevitably narrows the range and scope of things you might tweet about. You don’t want the scope to creep too much, but at the same time you want to be able to talk about a wide range of topics.

The channel mentality is useful, however, when you start to think about winnowing down offers and marketing plans. This is common enough in blog marketing practices – lots of people have lots of blogs, not just for interlinking purposes, but because it’s easier to market a given niche that way. Some campaigns just don’t fit a given channel. As our sister site Der Pengy just noted, there are inexpensive hosting accounts that let you manage multiple domains, or even separate WordPress installations on individual subdomains of a given site. So if your domain name is sufficiently generic, you could have “topicx.awesomedomain.com” for each channel.

Most people (including me) don’t think that far ahead. So we pick up additional domains, or if the campaign is seasonal or extremely specific, maybe we make do with a different blog service. Your portfolio of Twitter accounts, though, is a different kettle of fish. It’s my belief that you do not necessarily want to hyper-refine your topic list on Twitter. For one thing, you end up looking one-dimensional. Another problem is that you can end up missing out on offers that would otherwise prove valuable. It’s okay to generally talk about only one or two things, but don’t foreclose on the possibility of picking up new interests along the way.

And for the things that you are interested in, make sure that you’re deepening your reach into those areas with services like Mr. Tweet. That way you can ensure a robust channel and (even better) robust conversation.