I have been asked this in the past.
Why don’t I have my designation and employer’s name on my Twitter bio?
Additional questions usually are – are you hiding that so that you can talk about them freely and people won’t know your motives?
Are you not proud to be associated with your employer (whoever it is)?
Are you scared they’d know and start monitoring your tweets?
The answer to all this – no.
The reason why I don’t have my professional affiliations on my Twitter bio is simply because I don’t believe Twitter is an appropriate platform to display or demonstrate those things.
My job does not define me. Or, I believe it shouldn’t. Besides professionals who do something they like and enjoy doing for a living, I don’t see a point why your employment should define you as a person.
Unless of course you love your salary job so much that it IS your life – no qualms there… it’s different for everybody.
The situation is very different on Facebook or LinkedIn. For Facebook, it’s more like a laundry list of personal details that one adds. On LinkedIn, it’s rather focused on professional affiliations.
I see Twitter as an extension to my thought process. You may laugh at this, but I see things around me and think of how to express them in the best possible manner… under 140 characters. You may call it an obsession, but I see it simply as a form of expression.
A movie fanatic would see things around him/her as film shots. A poet (at least in his mind) would see things in the form poetical lines. Likewise, a photographer.
I’m neither. I’m just an ordinary person with a mildly above average command over English. And the best I can do is think of things in the form of tweets. There are people who does this stupendously well, though – like Ramesh Srivats.
So, since my Twitter feed is an extension of my thought process… and since I don’t think of work related things all the time, I don’t think my professional connection is necessary in my bio. I’ve only added my personal interests and pursuits in my bio and the title that I cherish the most – dad.
That I tweet a lot of social media related links and that I’m in the social media field professionally is entirely incidental. If the former helps me professionally, that too is incidental and something I could surely do with. But yes, the connection is adequately planned and executed, but you do understand that one can’t persist on a topic he/she doesn’t like… at least not for long. So, we are back to personal interests. If it helps me professionally, why not?
That doesn’t make it mandatory to add the resultant job as my identity… because it isn’t and need not be.
But this is just my perspective. Do you have your professional affiliation/job in your Twitter bio? If yes, why? If not, again – why not?
Image credit: Twittermania.nl.