Multiple Personalities on Twitter

Posted by TeamCharlie on February 27, 2009 under Gabe's Twitter Gems, Twitter | Be the First to Comment

As many of you know I began my Twitter journey fairly recently – that is in late December of 2008. I haven’t looked back since.  I like to blog about things I have a passion for, and it just so happens that right now I am passionate about several things.  In April of 2006, my dog Charlie founded Wags for Hope, which is a local pet therapy group in Frederick.  In March of 2008, my daughter and I founded Kids Are Heroes, which is a web site that inspires children to become active in their communities. I only mention this because these are two distinct endeavors that I am very passionate about.  So it made sense to me to create two Twitter personae.  TeamCharlie is my Wags for Hope identity where I recount stories of pet therapy in nursing homes, talk about dogs, etc..  KidsAreHeroes is my other identity where we promote our web site.  Now for the good stuff.

Since the start I have had one main blog where I reflect on all the things I care about.  I would expect most if not all of you bloggers on Twitter are using Twitterfeed to automatically feed your blog posts to Twitter.  That’s an easy and wonderful tool to have available.  But what do I do when I want to talk about Wags for Hope, or specific things that concern Kids Are Heroes?  How do I “split” my feeds?  This has been tormenting me for a while, so I made an effort yesterday to start really looking for this solution.  I was told about the ‘Filter’ option in Twitterfeed which is useful but not in my case.  The filter option will pull posts that have certain key words in them.  This doesn’t solve my problem.  I was surprised that I discovered little about this subject on the Internet or through my Twitter family.  At any rate I tripped over the solution this morning by simply playing with WordPress URLs.  I hope that those who are searching for the same solution find this blog post.  Full disclosure: This works for WordPress blogs only – you may be able to use the same logic on other blogs but I cannot attest to that. I currently use wordpress.com – not wordpress.org (I know – I need to upgrade) and I am assuming the same logic will work on both.

I wanted something that would filter tags (categories) instead of keywords.  Therefore I can tag one type of post with Wags for Hope and the other with Kids Are Heroes.  To separate them and create a feed link for Twitterfeed, here is what one of  mine looks like: http://gabeoneill.wordpress.com/category/kids-are-heroes/feed .  It’s as simple as that.  So I can split up the ones that do not apply to each other.  For something like this post that might benefit both identities, I created two feeds using the same tag and fed them to both Twitter ID’s.  I hope this tidbit is helpful to you.