Twitter bios: Don’t be a ‘rock star guru’

If you’re a “zombie aficionado,” a “Web marketing guru” or a “social media evangelist,” you may be doing Twitter wrong. The 160-character Twitter bio, your introduction to the site’s nearly 250 million active users, has been called a “postmodern art form”by The New York Times.

But for most of us, it’s a bit simpler than that. It’s a digital calling card, a way to sum up our very essence within Twitter’s 160-character limit and, presumably, tell people why they might want to follow us. So how did there end up being so many self-proclaimed ninjas, mavens, rock stars, gurus and experts on the site? Those terms, often delivered in a series of short, punchy sentences, have become copycat cliches in the Twitter age. And as Josh Schultz sees it, they’re worthy of parody.