You may have seen some tweets recently ending in ^CM or other initials. As Hootsuite points out, it’s the new thing: Twitter signatures, which help you identify who is sending the tweet in a large company.

But hang on, isn’t that completely missing the point of what Twitter is about?

In the beginning Twitter was set up for people to tell other people what they were doing and by God most people were anal enough to take that literally. I chucked Twitter last year because I couldn’t take any more of ‘had coffee, it was warm’ messages. But then it started to get a bit more interesting so I came back to it last summer. And then it got really popular. And then us pesky PR and social media expert types (remember, never trust someone who says they are a social media expert – there’s no such thing) turned up and started getting clients into it.

And that’s where the idea of Twitter signatures comes in. Basically you have a company. Let’s set up a company in Scotland called Social Media which would have the twitter address social_media. Now say Social Media has a staff of five and two like to tweet – Jim Stewart and Peggy Lane. At the end of each tweet they would put ^JS or ^PL so you know who did the tweeting.

Sound like a good idea? Sound sensible? It’s total nonsense.

Even though Twitter has moved on from the original concept and many outlets now use it purely as a broadcast platform instead of a conversational platform, it is meant to be about people not companies, so if different people from companies want to corporately tweet, give them all similar names. For example social_media_jim and social_media_peggy. Make the name work for you – and with some clever thinking or guidance you can have the twitter name(s) be part of your SEO strategy.