When blogging, tweeting or promoting via social means who do you promote your app from? It seems a very common setup to have a owner (actual person), an application title and a company, which one of these do you publish and promote from and why? Do you think it makes a difference?
1 Like
This should be an interesting discussion. When it comes to our Greenline Creative blog we blog as an actual person. I think because in that space it makes sense to show personality in the company and point of views.
When it comes to our product, we want our voice to feel like a small team. So, we are currently writing as one company. For our audience it is important that they feel the trust in us. Although we are just two individuals working on this product in the evenings/weekends, it does come across like we are a small team of 4-5 and I think that helps.
So in short, I guess it would depend on your goals and how you would want your company to be perceived as.
We have a company blog. It shows the author below the blog post, though I’m not sure how many people get that far. 
I’m about to resurrect my personal blog, just for fun. So I can post about business stuff that doesn’t make sense on our company blog.
I struggle with this one all the time. My company name is Farseer Games, my game is an iOS game called Krashlander, and I do most my “Twittering” as Jeff Weber.
I have a Farseer Games Facebook page, a Krashlander Facebook Page, and an @Krashlander twitter account. Feels like one giant mess at the moment.
Currently I’m leaning toward ditching the @Krashlander account on twitter and just using my @JeffWeber for all game related stuff.
Not sure what to do on the Facebook side.
-Jeff
1 Like
For Twitter I have a personal account and one for the company. The company Twitter account tweets content relevant to potential customers, thanks people who tweet blog content, and answers customer/lead questions. I like having them separate as it makes it easy for me to get help managing that account (yes, I outsource most of it).
For the blog, I started writing all posts myself (as me) but now have multiple people writers contributing. They all have their own blogs and businesses and get an author bio box at the end of the post. Doing it this way has worked out relatively well.
1 Like
Does it make a difference? Yes, in my opinion it does.
Being a bootstrapper, I can’t afford to lose time managing the mess of several blogs and accounts until I MUST have them. I prepare for them - but I don’t use them until necessary.
Having a product specific site/blog is a SEO issue too and my product will be getting less organic traffic for not having a large site, but I must protect my scarce resources. Also, a business blog that you don’t have resources to update is a sad sight. I prefer to put up a regular non-blog site with articles, if there’s no reason to use a blog.
Another point of view is the credibility. People in my audience rather enjoys reading articles with personal touch than material they find from a product marketing blog. But that depends on who you sell to and how do you want your audience to see you.
If your blog is not personal-personal, but personal-business, name it so that you can add other authors later if needed. E.g. not “www.jaanakulmala.com” but “www.happybootstrapper.com”
One other thing to think about is your mailing lists and their management. I collect separate lists, but merge them all to a master list. Eventually I’ll be starting to get unreasonable amounts on unsubscribes for pushing my marketing content, but that day is not today.
In my case, I think it will be the need to message technical stuff and product updates that will force me away from my current system - but as the mailing lists are separate already, I can easily send targeted messages if needed. And MailChimp has a handy grouping system too, for separating your segments.
What comes to twitter, I like earthlingworks’ approach. It seems pretty standard.
2 Likes
@erthlingworks Hopefully I’m not prying too much, but do you use a service for the twitter outsourcing or did you find a contractor?
No problem at all. I tried out an agency before and wasn’t happy with the results so I hired a freelancer (from the Philippines) and she’s doing a great job.
I noticed her because she was tweeting links that my customers would find interesting from her personal account. She was also following several people in the space so I felt like she’d be a good fit. Paying $200/m right now.
Drew and I both use Twitter as us, we’ve had accounts since quite early on. I’m rachelandrew most places online and Drew is drewm. I use Facebook as me really just for friends and family, people I have met or know pretty well. I have a personal site where I blog as me, personally.
For our product we have Twitter, a facebook page, a blog and so on. Twitter is the way most people interact with us.
We also have a never updated company blog at edgeofmyseat.com, when I get some time I’m going to change that to pull in data from our other places, so the company site becomes an overview of what we are up to rather than somewhere else we need to post.
I thin it really important to maintain a separate identity to the product/company. People talk to people and while we have a lot of Twitter followers for grabaperch, it would feel weird to talk personally via that account. I don’t promote overly from my personal account, I’ll tweet things that are of general interest to my most web developer following, and occasionally RT something from the grabaperch account. Mostly however, I’m just there to chat!
1 Like
Thanks for the open response @earthlingworks, it is interesting to hear that you found this person organically through Twitter vs. searching oDesk or similar. Glad it is working out for you, may try a similar approach to finding a writer in the future.
1 Like
Ruben, do you try to have a consistent voice for your company twitter account regardless of who is tweeting, or is that just not an issue with the 140-character constraint?
It’s generally not an issue on Twitter as long as the person is friendly and personal (vs corporate).
I had this very conundrum a few months ago and buddy who specialises in SEO advised to focus on one. He also suggested that taking a personal approach would suit me more. On my blog I post about many different topics. Some of interest to my business contacts (which I cross post on LinkedIn) and others not.
I tweet my posts to my personal twitter account and to my personal facebook account. The people I have worked with follow on both!
But ultimately there is only me. Keeping it personal seems to retain its authenticity. I also tend to have more to say for myself than for my business.
Perhaps the key is to create great personal relationships with people you’ve met through business?
This worked for me, it might not work for you.