Expensive image
I stuck to my decision: 100% in English or not. After a while, the questions from my Dutch followers stopped coming. My list of followers from Anglo-Saxon regions and elsewhere grew. More importantly: my tweets were retweeted to even more distant countries. Conversations arose with Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Yankees, back and forth too. But I noticed that I was disappearing from view in my own country. No longer listed in that handy Twitter guide and perhaps other overview lists. Assignments dried up. Lectures on social media and content marketing blew over. Just like consultancy jobs. Because of those English-language tweets? Could that be it? Did I suddenly have too expensive a list to data n image? Was I suddenly too inaccessible for many potential SME clients? Or did everyone just think I was crazy?
Even more swallowing. So why continue tweeting in English fulltime? So I decided to stop after about five months and tweet bilingually. And lo and behold, the list of followers from my own country grew again, steadily. And hey, the influx from more exotic regions also continued, albeit a bit less steadily.
Tweet new profile
This week I also decided to display my Twitter profile in full Dutch again. Funny: I immediately got a DM from an American follower asking why. He thought an explanation was logical. And a British follower wanted to interview me about content marketing, because he found my site so interesting. Not a word foreign on my site.
Learnings
Regret my 'English period'? Certainly not. I have often talked about it with Twitter loyalists over the past six months. Listened to their comments and they to mine. That was an interesting back and forth. This story is my learning, now those assignments need to be returned. They could also be in English.