Back in November I took the plunge and set up a second Twitter account dedicated to live blogging in Manchester. The idea was that @Sarah_Hartley would be a place for me to share news and views about what was going on in the city plus be a place for sharing links and making contacts to provide better coverage of events of interest to the digital community.
I separated it from my established Twitter identity of @foodiesarah thinking that people, who may have signed up to find out about food, but were more likely to want discuss the practice of journalism, might not be especially interested in Manchester news.
So @Sarah_Hartley became the place “to do” journalism while @foodiesarah remained the place to have a conversation “about” journalism.
As Manchester people started to follow, I followed back and joined their conversations. Very soon we formed a useful network across the city which prompted several news breaks, plenty of blogging inspiration and some interesting debates and enjoyable conversations. All good then!
There were some instances that this neat divide didn’t work – what to do with Manchester journalists? Which did they belong in? In the end there’s some people who get followed twice – and who follow both!
So now that I will be doing less live blogging, I’m wondering what to do. I’m happy to continue (although there won’t be as many Manchester events) or I can wrap everyone into @foodiesarah and do some live-blogging (at less of a volume!) with approriate hashtags as and when.
Seeing as there’s now more than 300 of us in this Manchester relationship – I’ll be guided by you.
Dim Sum Digital 
It’s possible to change an established twitter account name without losing followers – it all “just works”.
You could change it to something to suit a new purpose (or even its current purpose), and then possibly share that account with others who are able to commit to that purpose – a kind of mini-media channel, if you will.
And of course you could change foodiesarah to sarah_hartley and then that name is your own.
Just a thought.
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good thoughts!
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i think having only one account in the first place was better: it allows you have have ONE “identity”. perhaps your foodie readers can be “exposed” to Manchester? they might not even know it yet, but can become interested. and this works vice versa. what if there are live-bloggers who like to cook? it wouldn’t take a stretch of imagination to live-blog a cooking event? with all the live-video goodness from Qik? to not lose followers, you could just DM them, or visit the “followers” and “friends” of your other account whilst logged into the first one… and follow them all =P
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tweetdeck partially solved this problem for me. I grouped the people I follow so that I could participate in the pockets of conversations that revolved around certain subjects. But I guess it doesn’t solve the ‘noise’ problem for people who are not interested in my football tweets but still interested in my digital marketing tweets. Not everyone is a Derby County digital PR!!
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