Twitter Subaccounts

I think Twitter should have a concept of sub-accounts. It’s not smart to create a Twitter account for every small project, but it’s often a necessity for support or a social media presence. In my case, I have a Twitter account, and so does Oswald Labs (which makes complete sense since it’s a company and I’m just a small part of it).

However, I also have several other projects, like Made with Love in India, a platform to showcase Indian-made startups, which has its own Twitter account. However, I can’t keep scaling this for every new project (I refrain from saying “startup”, but what I mean is “super-early startup idea which still needs some social media presence”).

The solution: Twitter Subaccounts. I, @AnandChowdhary, can have sub-accounts, like this:

• Main account: twitter.com/AnandChowdhary
• Subaccount about GitWriter: twitter.com/AnandChowdhary/gitwriter
• Subaccount about whatever: twitter.com/AnandChowdhary/whatever

On going to twitter.com/AnandChowdhary, you see the combined timeline of all tweets authored by me, both from the main account and any subaccounts. On twitter.com/AnandChowdhary/gitwriter, you will only see tweets from the GitWriter subaccount. Think of it like adding a tag to your tweets, and a special view to see all tweets with a specific tag.

The second and more important part of subaccounts is that people can not just tag @AnandChowdhary, but also @AnandChowdhary/gitwriter. Now, people can say: “I think @AnandChowdhary/gitwriter is a nice way to quickly add blog posts to my site”, and I know they’re talking about the specific product, not me in general.

I as an individual don’t have to create a separate Twitter account for every single consumer-driven product, service, or open-source project. Larger companies can have subaccounts for categories (e.g., @Samsung/support instead of @SamsungSupport, and @Facebook/design instead of @facebookdesign).