Have you ever try to find out why people are following/liking you on social media service? Many said with common assumption; because they know them personally, because of their profession or even looking at the average content shared on the timeline.
For figures which personalities are already defined on traditional medias, entering the social media may reveal some of their real personality (in this case, if they handle their own account). In example, when a media moghul, Rupert Murdoch decided to use Twitter, his figure that is well known for being a power of media with all its misteries, slowly melts through his chitchat on Twitterverse. Many said that Twitter is ruining Murdoch’s reputation because we’ve lost a figure that has been shaped before. But I personally think that Twitter, on the contrary, is actually turning Murdoch’s figure far more human and showing his true character as one Rupert Murdoch.
Around two years ago, I did a little *) experiment on Twitter with the hope that I could learn whether a Twitter account could be directed according to the character tweeted on it. What I did was creating another account under my name (@abangedwin) and gave out a “personality” as written on the bio. Then what happened? A big “migration” happened from my main Twitter account (@bangwinissimo) to @abangedwin. Most of them are close friends and coworkers. Meanwhile, @bangwinissimo account which dedicated solely for information sharing was flooded by new followers which happened to be social media enthusiast, judging from their bio, and most of them came from non-Bahasa Indonesia speaking countries.
I haven’t get the chance to do similar experiment on Facebook or other social media but with Twitter’s horizontal characteristic and rapid density, I think we can encounter similar condition on other social media.
So what can be summed up from above experiment?
- Social media is more or less representing your personality in the internet world.
- Social media enables us to design our name (read: brand) with its personality that we choose to highlight.
On Social Media: You Are What You Share…!
*) On said experiment, I used Unfollowr to detect who unfollowed me and on the new Twitter feature, we get notification who is just following us.
Abang Edwin is a practitioner of online community management since 1998 long before the term of social media / social networks appear in the internet world. He began his journey by experimentation with several online communities which eventually successful at that, to this day he still gives consultations about knowing character and foster online communities for brands / agencies and individuals.
He was at Yahoo! for over 4 years as a community manager. Currently he is Country Manager – Indonesia for Thoughtbuzz.net, a social media monitoring company.
