Your Tiny Twitter Biography

Most social networking sites give you quite a bit of space to tell the world about yourself.

Not so with Twitter. You get a single line to reveal your bio, and that amounts to 160 characters or less.

It’s not surprising really, since Twitter is all about being short and to the point. But it does make writing your biography extremely important, because you need to tell people the most relevant things about yourself.

For example, if you are tweeting to help your business your bio needs to be relevant to that. I’m a writer, so my bio is writing related. If you are an eBay seller then your bio needs to be relevant to eBay and what you do.

The most important thing to think about is the actual words you are using as well. If you think about writing an actual sentence, you will soon run out of room to fit in all the facts. Cut things down as much as you can, so you have something that packs in a lot of information but doesn’t waffle.

Here’s an example for that fictional eBay seller:

“Professional eBay Power Seller, selling books and toys. I write about eBay in my spare time.”

That is actually 93 characters with the full stop at the end, so there is still room for some more as well.

Why is this bio so important? Well, it helps people to find you. One of the first things people tend to do when they start tweeting is to look for other people on the site who have the same interests as they do. By typing relevant words into the Twitter search engine, they will get back results which match to user names and biographies.

So in the above example, if someone is looking for anything or anyone with a connection to eBay, they will find you from that example – even if your user name has nothing to do with eBay at all.

You can see the importance of doing this, can’t you? It helps you connect with people, and it can help you to get found more easily. Some people don’t bother filling in their bio at all, and I think this is often because they want to get on with exploring Twitter and can’t be bothered to do it. They don’t realise how important it is in the scheme of things.

So go and take a look at your own bio. Is it up to scratch? Could it be better? Do you have one at all?

You know the answer to that one, don’t you?