Guest commentary by Sarah Yaussi

Sarah Yaussi is a business journalist and editor of Big Builder magazine. Prior to joining Big Builder in early 2005, she worked for both The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., and the BBC in London.

I had a colleague in the industry contact me with a really good question about Twitter. He wrote:

“We have been following your commentary on social media, which we find fascinating, but we’re not quite sure how to apply it to us.  We have one very specific question for you:  Do you think we should ‘tweet’ using our company name or as individuals?  We’re still not convinced that our clients or potential clients are following Twitter yet, but we are convinced that people that could refer us to our potential clients are tweeting, so we think we need to participate.”

I think this is one of the biggest, most polarizing questions about social media out there. I don’t know if I have the right answer—I guess only time will tell—but here’s my take on it.

It seems as though most people passionate about social media, and more specifically Twitter, suggest that you need a “face” to be able to leverage Twitter correctly. While I think that argument makes a lot of sense—people do like to connect with people versus inanimate objects—I don’t know that I totally agree.

Back when Big Builder magazine had more staff, we had several people tweeting on the magazine’s behalf. The way we worked it out was that we each had our own personal Twitter profile and then we rotated on who controlled the Big Builder one. The end result is we had both a corporate brand and a personal touch to our tweets. It worked well—for awhile.

Well, like many of our readers, we are doing more with less these days. Now, we just don’t have enough people, so I’m the only person able to tweet as Big Builder. I’ve pretty much let my personal alias fall by the wayside. And quite frankly, I don’t know that that decision has hindered us in any sort of way. We’re still finding that we’re gaining followers, our information is being retweeted, and people are reaching out to us via direct messaging. I guess it’s not really all that surprising that we’ve seen zero change. I personally feel like Builder X in X market that I’ve never met is totally more likely to look for Big Builder than Sarah Yaussi. So, it works for us.

However, I say that with the caveat that I think it depends on a company brand. For example, it occurs to me that maybe someone like John Burns might benefit more from having his name/picture as a twitter alias rather than the John Burns Real Estate Consulting (JBREC) logo.

I’ve also seen companies–I think either Wells Fargo or Citibank is who I’m thinking of—do something where they have a brand and they say, “This is Justin tweeting for X company. How can I help?” I think at first blush this may seem like the best solution—a compromise of sorts. This one person clearly doesn’t represent the whole of a national brand, but yet there’s a named person to whom people can connect. However, I don’t think that solution is entirely compelling either. It sort of reminds me of the virtual version of someone from some environmental organization trying to convince you to take a 10-minute survey as you’re just trying to grab lunch in the 15 minutes before your next meeting; they usually start by saying something like, “Hi, my name is Mary. Do you have a few minutes for the environment?”

Are you really going to stop? Not me.

So, my gut answer to this very good question is that using the company name as a Twitter alias is fine—particularly when the company is smaller and more compact in terms of not having divisions or franchises in multiple markets. But then again, maybe when you are big with a national footprint, the way to do it is how Lennar does it. They’ve got their corporate Twitter handle and then under the bio it says something like “Jane Doe, title, tweeting for Lennar.” And then the separate divisions have their own Twitter aliases as well.

But I guess really what I’m saying is that any way you want to create your Twitter profile, it’s the bio that’s the key. So many people never fill that out, and really it’s how you add credibility, at least in my mind.