Advice about twitter and not being anonymous

[BegoniaBigtoes]

I want to start a twitter account and tweet, for personal and professional reasons. I am fairly geeky in most areas, but very shy of social networking and don't feel comfortable with it - however I'm getting left behind work-wise and need to do it.

What worries me is I have some degree of public profile (not famous, but known in my field, and my audience includes children, who could find me on twitter if they tried...) - so it all has to be very clean, obviously I will not be able to be my fully unleashed effing & blinding self, which is fine. But looking at some people's feeds, they have people following them, who may post something rude or have a v adult name (like "bookcunt" for example!) and all that becomes visible to everyone.

Would it be better for me to do it anonymously or is there some way to not show this publicly? Is anyone in a similar situation?

On twitter someone following you does not mean they appear on your public timeline (what people following you see). However if they send you a message starting with @username or if they include @username in a message then that will be seen.

You would not be using twitter to engage with children... you would be targeting it at adults - their parents perhaps. Whilst children could find you and view your timeline, you can't control that - their parents should be controlling what their child does on the net.

Are there other people like you on twitter who you could start looking at, to see how they cope with the issue?

You have to be yourself - open, honest and identifiable. Otherwise what is the point? The caveat to that is when you're tweeting just professionally - for example, I started and grew a professional twitter stream to over 10,000 followers in the UK. I wasn't me (Madeleine) though, I was Microsoft Small Business. I do now have my own Twitter stream (@womandivorced) which is just me.
I'm not clear why you are doing it though. If it's going to be chore, you don't like it, you're scared etc - don't do it. It's OK to say you're not comfortable and would prefer to find other ways to communication.
I would suggest you try to think about your own personal brand. What do you want to say and why?
If you don't want people with vulgar names or who use profanities to follow you, block them.

Why not change your name a little?

I also have a public profile with kids and have a webpage in my own name, which is googable(?) by kids, but my twitter is a shortened version of my real name (eg think Nicola Smith, so my twitter is @NicSmith).

I also don't link to FB or Twitter on my website, although I know most others in my field do.

I make contacts by following others in my field who then follow me. So then they know my twitter name.

I am of your mindset though - I don't want to be 'responsible' for leading kids to twitter or FB (in my case it's mainly primary school age). But I figure if they do find me, I haven't encouraged it, and actually my twitter feed is pretty dull for little ones so I can't imagine they'll hang around for long!

Thanks everyone. I want to do it as a way of staying in touch with contacts and colleagues, keeping up with work news, and basically being someone who is on twitter, for the benefit of the increasing number of contacts for whom that is important. I wouldn't do a lot of tweeting probably, just enough to keep a profile. It's not really about a brand - I have a website already which does that job. Just about being present. Like I would advise freelancers who don't have a website that they should have one, twitter is now similar (except that I expect eventually it will change to something else).

Like you merry I wouldn't link to it from my website either.

I want to enjoy it, I just really have a horror of soliciting interest from other people. (I abandoned attempts at facebook because I couldn't bear to ask people to be my friend!) (I'm quite chatty in RL, honest!) I'm wondering if twitter might suit me better.

Twitter is a communicative medium so if you are going to use it, you will enjoy it and get more out of it if you use it more often and actually communicate with others.

You can use your real name or a variation thereof. I use my professional name, which is different from my RL name. I have a different account for my pre-teen magazine, which I ensure is free from profanity.

I suppose it depends how likely you are to have children follow you, and if you are advertising yourself as being on Twitter so that they can find you. I would not let my DC use Twitter yet, as there is a fair bit of swearing and adult content.

Twitter is great for making contact with others and keeping up with professional and personal acquaintances.