What shape are your breadcrumbs in?

By Nikki Pepper on March 21st, 2019

I’m not sure if I’ve always had such an acute attention to detail but after 21 years in business, it probably shouldn’t surprise me that I have developed a bit of a radar for some things.

Often I look at websites like we all do. Sometimes I’m looking for a service or a product to buy. Sometimes I meet someone new at a networking event and I’m interested to find out more about their business. Within seconds, I find myself drawn to their social media links as these can often tell more of a story about a person as well as their business.

Sometimes links are broken, sometimes social media profiles are pretty dormant… and this doesn’t mean that that the business or person in question won’t do a brilliant job providing their service or product… but I’m always interested to ‘follow the breadcrumbs’ and see what more they can reveal to me outside of a website.

At one of our recent Link4Business events we had this discussion and I used ‘Twitter’ as an example. Not everyone has a twitter presence, however if you think ‘transferable’, it might just highlight an area in your own business and perhaps your own digital footprint which could either be helping or hindering your business.

Here’s a quick check list we went through which is specific to Twitter.

  1. Is your twitter handle (twitter name) easy to remember and appropriate?
  2. Is your profile image the most appropriate or up to date image?
  3. Have you included an appropriate cover photo?
  4. Is your twitter profile bio up to date and relevant to how your account is, or how it will be used?
  5. Do you have the most appropriate website listed with your bio?
  6. Do you have your twitter account displayed on your website?
  7. Do you have your twitter account displayed in your email footer?
  8. Are your notifications turned ON? (Email / mobile app)
  9. Are you responding to other accounts who have mentioned you, liked your tweet or recently followed you?
  10. Are you providing value to your followers on your twitter account or only broadcasting without considering your audience?
  11. Are you including images in your tweets to raise visibility and add variation?
  12. How shareable are your tweets?
  13. What are you doing to make your twitter account get noticed?
  14. Consider using lists to filter out the ‘noise’
  15. Include checking in on twitter as a daily routine same as you might check your LinkedIn, facebook, instagram, emails etc

I think it is worth sitting down from time to time and consider what others may see if they ‘followed the breadcrumbs’. Sometimes the smallest things can make a big difference…