Branding Yourself on Twitter Works. (It Did in 2012, Anyway)
A new study exploits an upgrade in Twitter’s technology that year.
In 2012, an eon ago in social media terms, Twitter was terra incognita to a lot of executives of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies. When General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt made his debut on Twitter that September with the words “Hello Twitter,” the Wall Street Journal reported, one person replied, “@JeffImmelt how come my grandfather got on twitter before you?” So mean.
That year, though, Twitter rolled out a redesign that made it into a more effective tool for personal branding. One new feature, real-time push notification, significantly increased click-throughs of Twitter content. A new study finds that the redesign gave a measurable boost to the personal branding and career prospects of S&P 500 C-suite execs: CEOs, chief marketing officers, chief technology officers, and chief product or innovation officers.