Your Twitter profile has five seconds to impress me… starting now!

I have been attempting to grow the number of people I connect with through Twitter and as conversations and mentions happen, I get an influx of new followers. I am a bit backlogged at the moment reviewing all the great new Tweeters who are now following my account but I swear that I am working on it.

Unfortunately I don’t follow everyone back but do review everyone’s account. Your Twitter profile page is what I use to make that decision and the longest I generally take is about five seconds to decide whether your tweets are going to be of importance to me.

Sounds a bit harsh I know but its the truth and I know a lot of others who say the same thing. Here’s my process;

Review a person’s bio information and Web url to see if their background or interests match mine. No bio information or url is a the first strike as I like to know what people do or what they are about at a quick glance. You can say a lot in 160 characters.

Take a quick look at the tweets of the person that has followed you. If there are little or no tweets, I won’t follow that person. If there is tons of “Get Rich Quick” or “Why Pay For Teeth Whitening” I won’t follow. Twitter accounts strictly setup to provide quotes is another thing that I generally avoid

Has the person taken the time to upload a picture of themselves? This is a very cool way of giving a personal touch to your account. Take the time to do it.

Backgrounds. I am a sucker for well done, informative Twitter background. @PainterMommy’s custom backgrounds are great examples of this!

So that, in a nutshell, is what I’m looking for and I’m sure there are a lot of others who have a similar methodology when reviewing potential accounts to follow. Take the time to fill out your bio, add your website url, a personal picture and get some tweets if you want people to see what you are about in five seconds or less.

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