People buy from people is a saying that I have often heard, people have to like you as a person as much as anything else to buy from you. Well, that is not true of everything of course, we all have our favourite supermarket or large retailer, and we will sometimes buy on price alone, but in the main I think it is true, especially for the small business owner, it is important to ensure that you create the right impression, act professionally, be courteous and be liked before you are likely to sell anything to anybody.
So, this morning I received a very nice tweet from someone who said “good morning there kevin!” and it was someone who had never said that before so I checked their profile out and guess what, no name on the bio, just a brand, so I said “aaah, you have me there, a person hiding behind a brand, good morning whoever you are! 
” hoping to elicit some response that I would get to find out who I was talking to, but no, the response came back “Surprise? Well, yahh…. nice to hear from you. good morning there again. hope you have an awesome day over there….”
In itself a very pleasant conversation between two people in the morning but it got me to thinking that would I want to engage with further banter with this person, would I want to get to know this faceless/nameless person, would I therefore want to buy from this faceless/nameless person – I know that for sure after sometime I might get to know the real person but would I want to make the effort?
From a personal point of view I would much rather converse with someone who had a name, even the Met Office tweets introduce the name of the tweeter at the beginning and end of every shift as do the BT Care folk, so I think it is important to make sure that you put your name either on your profile/bio on Twitter/facebook or any other forum, or if you are tweeting for an organisation that you let folk know who the tweeter is when it is you who are tweeting?
What do you think, would you rather know the person you’re talking to or would you prefer to think you’re talking to a nameless/faceless entity?
It may be safer to hide behind a brand, but surely all business is a matter of risk? And if someone can’t risk telling me who they really are, then what is it that they do not want me to know? Not a recipe for building trust or loyalty, I would say!