Personal vs project Twitter account?

This is a great question. I have tried it both ways and ended up with a Twitter account for a project or domain, and another personal/floating account. Here are my reasons

1. After asking people that visit my outlets including social accounts they made it clear they like one topic per social account and domain. Frustrating to manage but it makes sense.

2. It means I can close out easier and not lose a big chunk (or worse) of the audience because it is a dead project. This sucks, but planning for future success or failure is a good idea in my opinion.

3. I know that people visiting/following are there for a particular subject and I can manage the content accordingly without worrying that personal opinions go against the visitor's viewpoints and causing any kind of offense.

Hope this helps, looking forward to seeing what others think on this topic.

If anyone is interested in trying out a new, related tool I’m almost feature complete on my MVP, basically a web based app to let you create investor style updates and daily stand ups that then post to Twitter as threads. That way you get to share and keep a copy for yourself at the same time. I’d love any feedback on the landing page - https://www.usethreadr.com - TIA!

I struggled with this for my product too for some time, and ended up with a blended approach - having 2 accounts—personal and project—but both market my product in different ways.

I tap on my personal twitter for building in public, sharing my struggles, celebrating my wins, storytelling my journey building my product. Occasional RT from the project account. The focus is on connecting with fellow humans - indie hackers and makers. The tweets are more spontaneous and organic.

Project account is for niche content about writing and about goals/productivity, and engaging with other project/brand accounts. Tweets are more planned and scheduled. Stuff that might feel more weird/off, if I did on a personal account.

Seems to be working so far. Both accounts help amplify each other. I get to @mention my product instead of adding a URL (which doesn't work as well for the algorithm), and folks on twitter get to check out the product first before being routed out of Twitter app. I see that as less friction to creating awareness.

I was looking into that as well.

It seems that you can only have 5 simultaneous accounts at once. Maybe I am wrong. Based on that I decided to not create an account for my latest project.

If a project takes off then maybe, i ll create one. Until then, i ll stick with my personal account.

I am sticking with personal brand, and here is why.

Projects tend to pivot over time. At beginning, Project do not have any brand recognition to attract attention.

We, as person, have initial acquaint that you can leverage to attract attention to the project. If/when you decide to pivot the project - you at least created some personal followers that you can reuse for next project.

I would go with a personal account. Most likely you'll have other projects in the future too that it will be useful for. Though if your Twitter account is already filled with family/friends, you may want to consider making a separate "professional" twitter account - one that you can post all of your startup-type posts to. I've found that's worked great for me so I'd definitely recommend going that route!

Hey Andreas -

I recently joined Twitter a few weeks ago myself after kicking off a small side project. I went the route of setting up both a personal and a project/product account.

My goal was to do most of my building in public via my personal account and use the project account for major milestone announcements and then eventually interacting with future users.

I don't plan on being too active with the project account until I reach MVP release (just little hints here and there of development updates), but I thought it would be smart to go ahead and reserve the username ahead of time so that I could ensure that the project website domain and usernames all matched up for consistent branding.

Personal. Projects come and go. When they go what are you left with? Your niche

Build an audience for your niche and it will be easier to launch your next project too

I'm curious what people think about this as well. I use only a personal account, but a few people follow me only because of one project - not sure they are interested in various different ramblings.

Maybe it depends what you want out of Twitter. You could have a project account for more aggressive promotion, and a personal one to connect with people.